Spring 2017 spot

$10 US

spring 2017

spring 2017 HCP’s 2016–2017 supporters editors Ashlyn Davis Caroline Docwra

spot is published twice yearly, in conjunction with the fiscal year of Houston Center for Photography. Subscriptions are free to HCP members.

spot web design Bandwidth Productions

spot is a journal of independent opinions published by Houston Center for Photography as one of its many services to the photographic community. The ideas expressed do not represent positions of Houston Center for Photography’s administration or membership and are solely the opinions of the writers and contributors.

design CORE Design Studio executive director Ashlyn Davis director of operations Caroline Docwra director of finance Sean Yarborough exhibitions and website coordinator Jessi Bowman access and community education coordinator Jamie Robertson education coordinator Japheth A. Storlie executive assistant Megan Sparks phillip and edith leonian resident instructor Mark Chen education assistant Emilee Cooney gallery associate Allyson Huntsman fall 2016 interns Evan Coleman Hallie Gluk

Copyright © 2017. All rights reserved.

No portion of spot may be reproduced without the permission of Houston Center for Photography.

Captions are based upon known information of the photograph. In cases where print type and medium are not listed, the image provider has noted these as variable.

Houston Center for Photography’s mission is to increase society’s understanding and appreciation of photography and its evolving role in contemporary culture. Houston Center for Photography strives to encourage artists, build audiences, stimulate dialogue and promote inquiry about photography and related media through, education, exhibitions, publications, fellowship programs and community collaboration.

For details about membership or advertising, contact: Houston Center for Photography 1441 West Aalabama, Houston, Texas 77006 t : 713.529.4755 f : 713.529.9248 info@hcponline.org

hcponline.org

HCP benefactors The Brown Foundation Houston Arts Alliance Houston Endowment The Phillip and Edith Leonian Foundation HCP underwriters The Anne Levy Charitable Foundation Artists’ Framing Resource Krista and Mike Dumas Patricia Eifel and Jim Belli Eleanor and Frank Freed Foundation JBD Foundation Jean Karotkin Larson-Juhl Antonio Manega Nena Marsh Poppi Massey Fan and Peter Morris Celia and Jay Munisteri Texas Commission on the Arts The Wortham Foundation HCP platinum sponsors Alice Kleberg Reynolds Foundation Elizabeth and Dave Anders Laura and Tom Bacon Katharine Bartheleme Bevin and Dan Dubrowski Frazier King Carol Liffman The National Endowment for the Arts Alexander and Muffy McLanahan QUE Imaging Texas Women for the Arts HCP silver donors Maconda Abinader Julie and Drew Alexander Amegy Bank Cara Barer The Beth Block Foundation Shelley Calton and Stuart Nelson Cameron International Corporation Susan and Patrick Cook Catherine Couturier Gallery Jereann Chaney Tom and Marybeth Flaherty Rashed Haq Sherry and James Kempner James Maloney Dallas McNamara Cali Pettigrew Aleksandra Roszko-Yoder Sue and Bob Schwartz Jay Seegers Laura and Todd Torgerson Darlene Walker and Reagan Redman

HCP green circle Joe Aker Eddie and Chinhui Allen Joan and Stanford Alexander Kenneth M. Anderson Gay Block and Billie Parker Deborah Bay and Edgar Browning Adele Bentsen Charles Butt John D. Chaney The Chaney Foundation Thomas Damsgaard Michael Deal Sarah Balinskas and Jeffrey DeBevec Annick & Mohammed Dekiouk Nancy Etheridge Exxon Mobile Foundation James R. Fisher The Albert and Ethel Herzstein Foundation Howard Hilliard and Betty Pecore Pat Gano Keith Guerrini Denise Hawk Betty Pecore and Howard Hilliard Barbara and Geoffrey Koslov Ysabel LeMay The Mavis Kelsey Fund Mickey and Mike Marvins Libbie J. Masterson Anna B. McCullough Will Michels Joan Morgenstern Robert Murray J. Andrew Nairn Burt Nelson Ashley Nix The Robertson-Finley Foundation James Pomerantz Chris Rauschenberg Paul Smead Scott R. Sparvero Sarah Sudhoff Urban / Duganier Family Lou Vest Bill Walterman William Temple Webber III The Joan Hohlt and Roger Wich Foundation Clint Willour Whole Foods

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A Handful of Dust: A Conversation between David Campany and Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa

17 The Intimacies of the Image: Naima Green and Jessica Lynne in Conversation

26 The Heaviness of Memory: Unpacking Personal Archives A Conversation Between Trent Davis Bailey and Klea McKenna

37 The Photographer’s Lament: An Interview with Alison Rossiter with Keliy Anderson-Staley

46 Framing and Re-framing: A Conversation between Sherwin Rivera Tibayan and Lauren Fulton

54 New Ways of Understanding Visual Culture: Pop Photographica An Interview with Daile Kaplan with Ed Osowski

64 Spotlight 66 Recent Acquisitions to the John Cleary Library

Contents

From the Editors

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As we forge ahead into 2017, HCP is dedicated to continuing to build these bridges. In a world that seems to grow more complicated every day, the staff and I are focused on promoting photography that inspires us to be more present in the world, ask the big questions, and ultimately, that makes us think. It is a great honor to be a part of an organization that takes you, our members, readers, and visitors, on that journey.

Ashlyn Davis, Executive Director

Beginning with a conversation between Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa and David Campany on his publication, A Handful of Dust, and culminating in a discussion between writer Ed Osowski and Daile Kaplan, the photography expert of “Antiques Road Show” and the unusual, quotidienne objects that integrate photographs into their design, this issue moves from processes to artistic movements to public and private archives.

The photograph’s reproducibility runs through all of these discussions and prompts the contributors to consider how photographs are produced, exchanged, collected, and in turn our own relationship to the histories, economies, and epistemologies created and contained within archives and even within single photographs. Through their thoughtful consideration of photography’s histories, these contributors highlight the malleability of personal and collective memories and their own potential as creators to change the ways we see the past.

Here, photography’s histories do not lie dormant; they highlight marginalia, ephemera, and ultimately our personal relationship to the medium which is fraught with political tensions, mistruths and omissions, and also inventiveness, cherished memories, and new connections.

Ashlyn Davis and Caroline Docwra

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2016 was an incredible year for HCP. We expanded our reach through all our programs, notably through our Access and Community Education programs that bring photography education to youth around Houston through our Flash Drive—HCP’s mobile photography education unit. We are also proud of the expansion of spot, which now includes twice the content and is distributed at bookstores around Houston. We exhibited artists from Houston to Hong Kong and featured a wide range of work from budding photographers in our teen program, Collaborations, to established artists like Alison Rossiter, who is included in this issue. All of our programs supported our mission: to encourage artists, build audiences, stimulate dialogue, and promote inquiry about photography and related media. Most importantly, these programs strove to build bridges between photography and the broader world around us.

From experience we know that if we do not learn from our histories then we may be destined to repeat them. The Spring 2017 issue of spot considers the contemporary artist’s role in historical investigations. These featured artists and writers mine the many histories of photography in order to reframe, recreate, or intervene in personal or cultural narratives.

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This Spring 2017 issue coincides with our Annual Fine Print Auction, which takes place on February 22nd here in Houston. Every year, this event gathers together artists, galleries, and collectors from around the world to bid on outstanding photographic art that benefits HCP’s exhibitions, educational initiatives, Access and Community Education programs, and of course, spot magazine. We are thrilled to be honoring HCP founders and art icons Anne Wilkes Tucker and Clint Willour this year for their vision and dedication to HCP and photography in Houston and beyond. The essence of their involvement from the very beginning is representative of the spirit of the organization still to this day—ambitious, fun, and most importantly, passionately committed to serving our growing community of photographers, students, educators, and art enthusiasts.

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Contributors Andy Adams

Lauren Fulton

Andy Adams is an experienced producer with a passion for visual media and digital culture. Since 2004, he has consulted cultural institutions that use the Internet to engage, inspire, and educate the public.

Adams is a pioneer in the field of online arts exhibition and has collaborated with the RISD Museum of Art, the Australian Centre for Photography, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art and numerous other organizations. He is an evangelist for the Web’s potential to inspire communities and regularly speaks about the opportunities digital media provide creators to connect with their audiences and each other online. In his spare time, he hosts the FlakPhoto Network, a 13,000-member online community focused on conversations about visual culture. Adams is the 2017 HCP Fellowship juror. Find him on Twitter @ FlakPhoto.

Lauren Fulton is Curatorial Assistant at the Aspen Art Museum. In 2015, she received her MA in Art History, Theory, and Criticism from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and holds a BA in Art History and BS in Journalism from the University of Kansas (2011). She frequently curates exhibitions in Texas and Chicago, and has worked at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Nasher Sculpture Center, Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, and the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art.

Jessica Lynne Keliy Anderson-Staley Keliy Anderson-Staley has work in a number of private and public collections, including the Library of Congress, Portland Museum of Art and Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. She has an MFA from Hunter College, and she is an assistant professor at the University of Houston. Her first book, On a Wet Bough, was published in 2014 by Waltz Books. She is represented by Catherine Edelman Gallery.

Jessica Lynne is a Brooklyn based arts administrator and critic. She received her BA in Africana Studies from NYU and has been awarded residencies and fellowships from Art21 and The Cue Foundation, Callaloo, and The Center for Book Arts. Jessica contributes to publications such as Art in America, The Art Newspaper, The Brooklyn Rail, Hyperallergic, and Pelican Bomb. She’s co-editor of ARTS.BLACK, a journal of art criticism from Black perspectives, and a founding editor of the now defunct (but still special) Zora Magazine. Currently, Jessica serves as the Manager of Development and Communication at Recess. Find her on Twitter and Instagram at @lynne_bias.

Klea McKenna

Headshot by Jonno Rattman

Ed Osowski Ed Osowski is a Houston-based accumulator of photographic images. He occasionally writes about photography and has a special interest in the critical issues surrounding non-canonical and vernacular photography.

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Ashlyn Davis

Caroline Docwra

Ashlyn Davis is an editor of spot and Executive Director of HCP.

Caroline Docwra is an editor of spot and Director of Operations of HCP.

Klea McKenna (b. 1980, Freestone, CA) is a visual artist who works primarily with light-sensitive materials. She holds an MFA from the California College of the Arts. Her recent exhibitions include: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Contemporary Jewish Museum; Heckscher Museum of Art, Huntington, NY; Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego, CA. Public collections include: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Santa Barbara Museum of Art; Mead Art Museum, Amherst, MA; and the US Embassy, Republic of Suriname, US Department of State. She is the daughter of renegade ethnobotanists, Kathleen Harrison and Terence McKenna. Klea lives in San Francisco with her husband and their young daughter.

Headshot by Emily Nathan

Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa is a photographer, writer, and editor of The Great Leap Sideways. He has contributed essays to catalogues and monographs by Vanessa Winship, George Georgiou, and Paul Graham. He was a Light Work artist-in-residence in May 2016, recently guest-edited the Aperture PhotoBook Review (Spring 2016), and is a faculty member at Purchase College, SUNY.

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Trent Davis Bailey (b. 1985, Denver, CO) is an artist and photographer based in the San Francisco Bay Area. His work has been exhibited extensively in California and Colorado, as well as nationally and internationally. Most recently, he was an Artist-in-Residence at Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Colorado. In 2015, he was awarded the Snider Prize by the Museum of Contemporary Photography for his series, The North Fork. In 2014, he was a recipient of Magnum Foundation’s Atlantic Philanthropies Grant. Bailey received his MFA from the California College of the Arts, and his BFA in Photography and BA in Art History from the University of Colorado at Boulder. He is currently a lecturer in the photography program at the California College of the Arts.

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Trent Davis Bailey

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David Campany and Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa

Installation view, Pratt Institute. Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray “Dust Breeding” 1920, printed 1921 in Literature, vol 2. no. 5, 1922

That seemed amazing to me: a photograph of over seventy years of age had had that kind of hold on a photographer, and that kind of relevance to a completely different artistic and political context. Well, from then on Dust Breeding was firmly in my consciousness and I started to notice more affiliations and influences.

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A Conversation between

David Campany (DC): I feel as if that dust took a long time to settle in me, so to speak. I first saw the photograph back in 1989, when I was an undergraduate. It was in a show at London’s Royal Academy, celebrating 150 years of photography.

I thought it looked so strange. It didn’t seem to fit with anything. It was made at the onset of surrealism and the New Vision but it doesn’t look like either. I was intrigued that two artists had signed it: Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp. The dust is gathering on Duchamp’s Large Glass, which was then still in the making. Scratching around for information, I noted that in books on Man Ray the photograph was presented as a visionary work of art. But in Duchamp books, it was more of a document like a production still. Three years later I was a student working in an arts bookshop in London when Sophie Ristelhueber published Fait, her book of photographs of the Kuwaiti desert, taken shortly after the Iraqi army had withdrawn.

In an interview Ristlelhueber cited Dust Breeding, with its ambiguous sense of scale and place, as the visual template for her own project. That seemed amazing to me: a photograph of over seventy years of age had had that kind of hold on a photographer, and that kind of relevance to a completely different artistic and political context.

Well, from then on Dust Breeding was firmly in my consciousness and I started to notice more affiliations and influences. You can see that image as a precursor to the early work of Bruce Nauman, for example. The first survey show of conceptual art, Information, at MoMA in 1970 included Dust Breeding as a keynote image for the art to come.

Rosalind Krauss wrote about it in her landmark essay “Notes on the Index.” Many contemporary artists are still drawn to it. About a decade ago I was asked by Sophie Howarth to write an essay on a photograph of my choice, for a book titled Singular Images. I chose Dust Breeding and in writing the short text I realised there was so much more to explore. Finally I’ve attempted it. A long time coming!

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A Handful of Dust:

Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa (SWW): So your latest book retraces the history of photographic modernism and the transformation of modern life from roughly 1920 to 2015, and it does so by way of a photograph that eventually came to be known as “Dust Breeding.”

How did you arrive at this point of departure?

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John Gerrard, Dust Storm, Dalhart, Texas spring

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“ Photography is unmoored and porous, belonging everywhere and nowhere, right

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across modern culture, and not just to art.”

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SWW: There’s something in that history of Dust Breeding’s evolving affinities to other artists and critics over time that clarifies photography’s extraordinarily adaptive nature.

You write in the book that “[p]hotography is unmoored and porous, belonging everywhere and nowhere, right across modern culture, and not just to art.” Photography has been the willing servant of such radically distinct masters over time. How did you set about tracing a path in images “from the cosmic to the domestic,” as you subtitle your long essay in the book, and how did you think through ways of dealing with photography’s mobility?

DC: In his 1963 memoir Man Ray describes how the dust photograph came about. He had been asked to document works in the collection of Katherine S. Dreier, who was then setting up the Société Anonyme and needed images for press

Eva Stenram, from the series Per Pulverem ad Astra, 2007 courtesy of the artist

and publicity. He recalls: “The thought of photographing the work of others was repugnant to me, beneath my dignity as an artist.” I’m fascinated by the idea of copy work being the basis, or even baseness of photography, and that a photographer with artistic ambition might be made anxious by it. That idea really haunts all of photography, but it energizes it too. Whatever the artistic ambitions, there remains a degree of plain, automated copying in all photography.

I wanted to trace the arc of that anxiety and possibility. I also wanted to trace the arc of plain subject matter in photographic art, and you can’t get much plainer, less desirable than dust.

Moreover, I think automated copying and dust are linked in photography. Dust is usually what you get as a side effect, both in modern life and in photography. There’s an unlikely kinship there.

I can formulate it quite clearly now, but for a long while I was intuiting this and following my nose to a whole range of photographic practices and works from across the last century. These then got reconsidered much more soberly, and over time they were whittled down to a group or lineage that made some kind of sense to me. It included everything from postcards and press photos of dust storms, to avant-garde journal articles, conceptual art works, surrealist photography and documentary photography. Selecting and sequencing images. Over the years this has become my approach to writing. Images first, then words. In fact with my publisher MACK, we found a way to articulate this. The ‘image track’ of the book presents all the works, one to a page, around 150 of them, arranged to articulate a chronology and various affinities. Then, there’s an insert with my long essay, plus the works reproduced as small thumbnail illustrations. A viewer/reader can approach it image-to-image, or more ‘theoretically’ through my writing.

Hopefully they’ll do both, feeling the differences and similarities.

André Kertész, Broken Plate, 1929 courtesy of the artist

It’s interesting that photography became important to contemporary art by becoming an allegory or an operating table, a place for taking apart or remaking its non-art practices.

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SWW: You’ve talked before about photography’s moment of ascendancy in visual culture at the height of the picture press, and it’s certainly great to see such an expansive book and exhibition encompassing a broader church of photographic uses and users than the traditional art history canon. Many of the works in the book deal with tumultuous events (like war, famine and death), or propose a shift in conventionally stable cultural categories (like Evans’s ‘Color Accidents’). This reminds me of Allan Sekula’s claim in The Body and the Archive that “photography is modernity run riot,” which I think encapsulates both the transformative effect of technology and the industrial revolution, and the way the camera changes practices in utterly unrelated non-art fields (like criminology).

How did you think about change and transformation in your research and your writing, and could you map out some of the changes you outline in the show?

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DC: Allan Sekula was right on that score. To follow photography really is to follow it running riot. It scrambled the cultural hierarchy that put museums and canons at the top, books lower down, magazines still further and websites grubbing along the bottom. It’s been interesting to see museums respond to this, becoming places that might incorporate all the outlets and platforms created, adapted or adopted by photography (the running riot). Museums may still be platforms in their own right, but they have also become places simply to look again at all the other platforms. So, I have no problem putting a magazine spread in proximity to a Jeff Wall photograph; a once discarded press photo or postcard alongside a consecrated masterwork

by Edward Weston. Sure, it presents its own challenges and pitfalls and one has to be on one’s toes, both as a curator and a viewer, but that’s all to the good. Moreover, I can’t imagine it any other way. Images in the mind know no barriers.

There they mix and inform each other. I feel we should accept that and work with it.

SWW: In this new book, and your two previous ones (The Open Road, Walker Evans: The Magazine Work) you have insisted on the co-equal status of non-art photographic uses to understanding the medium, in recognition of photographic art’s irreducible links to popular culture and public space. What role does this book and exhibition play in that ‘transformed’ context, and what do you hope are the implications of this for the art history of photography?

DC: Well, I would hope they’re suggestive or instructive, or at least engaging responses to the challenges of ‘photography run riot.’ It’s interesting that photography became important to contemporary art by becoming an allegory or an operating table, a place for taking apart or remaking its non-art practices. Think of art photography in ‘the documentary style;’ or the artist as archivist; the artist as still life photographer; the artist taking on the guise of the news photographer, the packshot photographer or fashion photographer and so on. That was inevitable and has produced at least some extraordinary work. Speaking personally however, I’ve never felt I needed art or an artist to help me ‘see’ the common vernacular practices for what they are, in all their complexity. They’re just as interesting on their own terms. So, for example, I find Douglas’s reimaginings of a postwar press photographer (his series Mid-Century Studio) no more or less engaging or significant than the work of postwar press photographers. I suspect Douglas does too.

I’m just as happy and stimulated looking at Cold War-era commercial studio photography as I am contemplating Christopher Williams’ arch ventriloquism of it. And I suspect he is too.

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Jeff Mermelstein, Statue (‘Double Check’ by Seward Johnson), New York, September 11, 2001, courtesy the artist

What would a picture be if it was comprised entirely of the stuff we don’t usually want?

What if the background was the foreground?

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Walker Evans, Trash Can, New York c. 1968, courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art

SWW: It’s interesting to note the extent to which a lot of contemporary fine art photography now directs our attention reflexively back toward the digital substrate of modern images, and to the illusionistic relationship photographs establish to the material world.

The dust now is the pixel in the screen rather than the mote hanging in the air…

Kikuji Kawada, The Japanese National Flag, Tokyo 1965, from the series The Map, © Kikuji Kawada. Courtesy Michael Hoppen Gallery and Photo Gallery International

DC: I’ve long been fascinated by the fact that photography became modern when it gave up its surface at exactly the same time painting was becoming modern by foregrounding its surface.

To be honest there’s so much at stake in this I feel it deserves its own book! And I’m not sure I’m the one to write it. But I can’t help thinking that art photography’s current thrashing about in an attempt to articulate some sense of surface is another iteration of its long standing ambivalence about its essential surfacelessness. ‘Essential’ in the sense that an image formed by light has no materiality, and the substrate is always secondary, deriving from the attempt to fix it and make it manifest. n

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DC: I think that comes with any lens-based image.

It knows no hierarchy, it takes in the world whole, all at once, the desired stuff and the undesired stuff. It has a radical sense of contingency that always threatens to give intention the slip, and to tip the image into chaos. For photographers this is often a problem, until they learn to handle it. Baltz was very elemental about it, whereas a photographer like Lee Friedlander accepts the chaos, delicately marshalling it into a picture that can then contemplate it. Many of the earliest commentators on photography noticed its capacity to pick up all manner of little details without the ‘author’ having to fuss over their presence. Think of Fox Talbot noting how photography incorporates levels of detail that only the most pedantic painter would see fit to include.

Moreover that very background condition often underpins the reality effect of photography. The nondescript, undesired extras we get in a picture actually have a vital role. This is why if you Photoshop all the unwanted stuff out of a photograph, it ends up not looking like a photograph.

Well, what would a picture be if it was comprised entirely of the stuff we don’t usually want? What if the background was the foreground? That’s one way of understanding Dust Breeding: an image that turns photography’s unwanted marginalia into its very reason for being.

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SWW: So much of the work in A Handful of Dust directs our attention toward the at once eloquent and recalcitrant matter of the earth: Xavier Ribas’s fantastic series Nomads for instance, or Lewis Baltz’s Nevada to name just a couple. You talk in the essay about photographs “turning background into foreground, ground into figure.” How do you account for photography’s fascination with the vagaries and textures of the ground on which we walk, and its influence on other art practices?

— Editor’s Note: This interview was originally published in an expanded form on January 22, 2016 on The Great Leap Sideways, an online gallery space dedicated to showcasing cotemporary photography.

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The Intimacies of the Image: Naima Green and Jessica Lynne

H O U STO N C E N T E R F O R P H OTO G R A P H Y

in Conversation

Photographer Naima Green is an artist whose images I return to often. They are potent. They are vulnerable.

As a viewer, I want to stay with them, linger a little while

follows is an extension of the ongoing conversation we began long ago about photography, blackness, and her beautiful series, Jewels from the Hinterland. Specifically,

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two years now, and in many ways, the conversation that

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longer. Naima and I have known one another for about

we think through the nuances of image making in the digital age, the importance of archives, and what it

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means to come into moments of creative clarity.

Naima Green, Nadine, Brooklyn Botanical Garden, 2016 from the series Jewels from the Hinterland, courtesy of the artist

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NG: It’s partly related to my personality. My private life is so important to me. I can’t just give an image away to the first person who wants to see it. But I have been thinking a lot about vulnerability as an act of generosity.

When thinking about my own privacy and image, the photographs I make picture me without my physical presence in the picture. I’m still sharing myself because I’m sharing my ideas. Though, I never want to be the center of attention. That’s not why I’m making the work. I’m making the work so that the subject is seen in a way that they feel proud of.

JL: In thinking about archives, histories, and their plural existence, Instagram, in particular for a photographer, could be argued to be its own kind of archive or repository. Yet, you don’t own those images once you agree to the terms of engagement.

NG: It’s insane that someone else can own your memories.

studio space, when you choose to share or translate that to Instagram, we are met with a simultaneity. There is one history that can be interacted with on terms that are not set by you really, and then, there is this other space whose terms are always decided by you. You are the person deciding who gets to engage with those images. You are the person deciding when and how they will be shared. That duality is fascinating to me. How does one navigate that duality?

NG: More and more, I’m treating Instagram like a mood board. I’m not afraid to delete things and take them away. What’s great is that people feel as if they know you through social media but in fact I’m curating an experience for them.

What I find problematic is when people feel like my Instagram feed embodies who I am. We still need to be able to have conversations and look at each other and talk to one another. Printing out all of the images from Jewels—I’ve never seen the work altogether—is something I would never put on Instagram because it’s something that is personal and something that I am still working through. There are some processes I don’t mind sharing and then there are others that I prefer to spend more time with. So, you’re absolutely right.

We are creating archives. But what happens to the posts you delete or the things you don’t want to remember or talk about visually anymore?

JL: There are also instances where artists have created work, not received acknowledgment in real time, and then, their work is left in silence for ten, twenty, thirty years, without a steward. Regardless of how well the artist tried to keep their body of work together, if they die in obscurity …

NG: It’s no longer your story to tell.

JL: Whoever finds it, can manipulate the archive.

NG: Or, whoever buys the archives, mediates the story. Think about Vivian Maier’s archive, for example. The story becomes equally about the discoverer. And you know, in this instance, he is taking care of the work and I’m glad for that, but he now becomes part of her story.

JL: During Black Art Incubator this summer, one of our first workshops was with Sur Rodney Sur, Lorraine O’Grady’s lead archivist. Lorraine is very much in control of her story. If you’re going to write about Lorraine, you have to go through Lorraine first. I appreciate that. It’s an insistence.

You’re also insisting on being insistent so that your images aren’t found in a box years down the line and subject to someone re-narrating you.

So maybe, even with the tensions surrounding what it means to image in the era of the internet, a small part of me is willing to give these social platforms a pass because they offer, to a certain extent, individuals the opportunity to be named. It doesn’t excuse all of the other problems that come with the platforms though.

NG: Certainly, but they are really important in the way you describe. As I was saying to André Wagner, a friend and fellow photographer, we get found in these spaces by a variety of people. I did a bunch of corporate head shots two weeks ago, and then I shot the opening party for The Wing. Even my upcoming show (Her Fee Planted Firmly on the Ground at HCP)! It definitely broadens reach.

JL: Let’s switch gears slightly. How are you feeling about Jewels now? I ask you this all the time but it’s the question I’m compelled to ask. You’ve compiled these stunning images, and now you are in the place where you are ready to think about and see them as a unit. What are you hoping to feel once you have them on the wall staring back at you?

NG: What I hope to get is a sense of completion. I’m hoping that the complexity and nuance that I’ve been striving for comes across. In a recent crit, I showed our images and they were the four that I happened to have printed, but they were all very similar. And during the crit, someone said to me that it felt like I had taken one really structured idea and swapped it for another really structured idea.

JL: The structured idea being what?

NG: They felt like the subjects could have been interchangeable based on how the photographs looked, and in those four images I do understand that comment. I wouldn’t normally sequence them next to one another, but I think that feedback was important for me to hear. It’s been helpful to see the work with fresh eyes. I’m really excited to put all of the images up to start arranging and rearranging, making sure that I’m staying true to the nuance that I’m so adamant about.

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JL: What does it mean to make images in this era? I feel as if there are a myriad of opinions: It’s great. It democratizes subjectivities. Then, on the other hand, there is a formal concern: What does it do to the mechanics of the craft and how might that affect one’s professional ability to be selected by curators or receive critical attention? It’s always fascinating to talk with you about this notion of protection and privacy. Clearly, you are a collaborator, but I wonder if you feel like there is something to be gained from this insistence of a kind of privacy around your work. Or, do you feel that you are missing out because you don’t present on social media in the way other photographers may present?

JL: The internet is an open source entity. It can bring a lot of good, but the creation of such an archive via a third party brings up conversations about labor and authorship that have always loomed over black cultural producers, in particular. In this moment, as you are building an archive that exists in your

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When thinking about my own privacy and image, the photographs I make picture me without my physical presence in the picture. I’m still sharing myself because I’m sharing my ideas.

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right Naima Green, Lee, Central Park, 2015 from the series Jewels from the Hinterland, courtesy of the artist

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left Naima Green, Diamond, Brower Park, 2016 from the series Jewels from the Hinterland, courtesy of the artist

JL: Whenever I think about this project, as much as I love its response to the flaws of twentieth-century urban planning, I also think about who has been involved. There is so much vibrancy in black New York right now even as there is a tremendous amount of pain and anguish. There are so many convergences that are happening within this project. There are activists, writers, poets, and other visual artists. When I think about how we will name this time—“young, black New York”—I can imagine Jewels serving as a reference point from which we might gather a visual language at least. “Young, black New York” in different historical epochs has been such a bloodline for the city. You are capturing that in this time.

And, I’ve never said this aloud, but that’s what rises to the top for me.

It’s a mapping of sorts and that feels like an urgent subtext of this work.

NG: The mapping is really important to me. I’m trying to figure out how to show those intersections. It’s a mapping of place—where the images are physically occurring—but also a mapping of this time as you said. I’ll be with different groups of people and someone who maybe hasn’t met someone before will say, “oh yeah, I’ve seen your picture; I know you.” We’re becoming familiar with one another by seeing one another. No, it doesn’t mean that we know each other, but we know of one another and what they are contributing to the culture. In a way, the project is about the creation of an alternative present. That is the beauty of loving and living in this world of photography.

I have the opportunity to create the world that I know to be true, and what several other people know to be true as well.

JL: What excites me most as someone who is invested in critical conversations about photography is that I know it’s not just you. There is a cadre of photographers of color who are doing this work, inscribing our stories visually in new ways and we are the beneficiaries of a history that, to a certain extent, has and is being reckoned with. There are scholars, like bell hooks, who have been writing about what it means to image make, and produce, and we can pick that up, from both a formal and theoretical standpoint, and fashion something from that. We can sit, ponder, and respond to these many gestures.

NG: That’s why I spend so much time thinking about my collaborators as I image-make. I don’t want this project to be a classist endeavor. It’s hard because everyone comes from very different socioeconomic backgrounds.

Still, the people that I work with have the time to think through the ideas, sit down, and work with me. So, I’m thinking about who has time for leisure.

JL: I’ve wondered if class has come up for you before. Given how you approach image-making, taking into consideration the newly found photographs of your own family, even; when conversations about class have come up, what have they been like?

NG: You know, I haven’t had a ton of conversations about class. It’s mainly been personal thinking. For me, it’s two fold. My network is my network. These are the people I have access to. They are people I can email. I don’t want to insert myself into a culture or world that isn’t my own, but I also want to figure out a way to approach new people. I really do want to think about how I can create a more in-depth picture of blackness beyond just black middle-class creatives. But again, maybe it’s not my role to document that.

It’s not something that will be reconciled with Jewels, but it’s top of mind.

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Naima Green, Nantale, High Line, 2014 from the series Jewels from the Hinterland courtesy of the artist

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It’s a mapping of place—where the images are physically occurring—but also a mapping of this time

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JL: I don’t think it has to be reconciled with this very project, but to be actively negotiating it is important. In a city like New York, the class gradients are often extremely legible. And, as we have been saying, capturing images that are able to offer up a new truth, or, a wider truth feel urgent now.

NG: It’s the power of the everyday. There’s someone who I really want to work with and I don’t know if I will but Deana Lawson has the ability to do this with her photography. It’s about trust, isn’t it? To allow someone to look at you or to do the looking.

JL: I couldn’t agree more. I immediately think of her Untitled (Snapshot) series that tells the story of a young family’s experience with incarceration. Each snapshot is the couple in front of the same wall, visitation photographs, taken each time the young woman and child come to visit the man. For a lot of people, there is nothing spectacular about this familiar scene, and yet, Lawson manages to find the spectacular. The images are breathtaking. They could be people you know, and yet, here is so much universality in them, a universality of family and love that are often not ascribed to people in that situation.

H O U STO N C E N T E R F O R P H OTO G R A P H Y

NG: It’s about seeing the importance of all different type of stories. Where one person might consider that narrative to be mundane, that is his life. LaToya Ruby Frazier works in a similar way with her photographs of Braddock,Pennsylvania. There is a clarity of vision that both women have. I feel connected to that. Even if I get stuck or at times can be too strict with myself, I’m glad I know what I’m going for, and moving forward, the intention remains, but I’m going to be more flexible and not get caught up in the seriality of things. When I was teaching, I would always tell my students that process can be its own end. I haven’t always allowed that of myself. I want to learn how to better feel my way through this work rather than always think my way through it. n

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Naima Green, Sade, West Harlem Piers Park, 2013 from the series Jewels from the Hinterland, courtesy of the artist

Trent Davis Bailey: Let’s begin with your 2008 project, The Butterfly Hunter. How did this body of work come about?

Klea McKenna: In the year 2000, my dad died of brain cancer, and one of the things I inherited from him was an old-fashioned travelling-type trunk that was filled with butterfly specimens he had collected from 1969 to 1972 in Indonesia and Colombia. They were folded up in these little triangular, origami-like folds of paper just as he had collected them. Normally people use a special type of acid-free paper to do that, but he didn’t have that with him so he used scraps of magazine pages, local newspapers, visa documents, even pieces of his own writing, and whatever else he had available. As an artist, I knew I would have to do something with it, but I hadn’t been able to figure out quite what that was. Throughout my twenties, I moved from apartment to apartment with this thing underneath my bed.

The Heaviness of Memory: Unpacking Personal Archives

TB: Did it become a burden?

KM: Yeah, it became a burden. It smelled like mothballs. It was this strange and psychologically heavy object. I had poked around in it, opened it up, and peered into it, but I hadn’t really unpacked it because it was so daunting. After I began unpacking it, it was immediately clear that the butterflies were beautiful and interesting, but the real stories were in the pieces of paper. It was not just an archive of these specimens, but it was also this archive of world news from that period and a chronicle of my dad’s journey. Eventually, I unpacked all 2000 of them and photographed about 500.

TB: What came to your mind as you were unpacking them?

KM: I liked to think about my dad wrapping up each specimen one-by-one. I envisioned us having this parallel experience across time. For me, in that moment of discovery, I’m opening it up and I’m imagining him closing it 40 years earlier in all of these strange places. I picture him in tents in the Amazon and rented bungalows in Asia where he’s closing up these little time capsules.

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she discovered many of them were made in the town of Paonia, Colorado, which happens to be the birthplace of her father. She then contacted Bailey to let him know about the coincidence. They’ve since become friends and have noticed other parallels. Perhaps it is not surprising then that both of them make work that is the result of chance encounters grounded in places of personal significance.

The following dialogue is an excerpt from their two studio visits.

It was not just an archive of these specimens, but it was also this archive of world news from that period and a chronicle of my dad's journey.

top left Klea McKenna, detail of 1km. West of Florencia, Caguata, Colombia, 13 January 1971, 2008 from the series The Butterfly Hunter. Archival pigment print. left Klea McKenna, detail of Arica, Amazonas, Colombia, 10 August 1971, 2008 from the series The Butterfly Hunter. Archival pigment print.

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In September and October of 2016, Klea McKenna and Trent Davis Bailey met at McKenna’s studio in the newly developed Minnesota Street Project in San Francisco.

While conversing about their work as artists, they reminisced about their separate upbringings in the American West, and their mutually unfolding influences of kin, environment, and archive. McKenna first discovered Bailey’s work through his MFA thesis exhibition at the California College of the Arts in 2015, six years after she had graduated from the same program. She felt a pull to his photographs and once she looked up his back-story

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A conversation between Trent Davis Bailey and Klea McKenna

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Klea McKenna, Automatic Earth #26, 2016 from the series Automatic Earth Photographic rubbing. Unique gelatin silver photogram.

Courtesy of the artist and Von Lintel Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

TB: Your photograms remind me of artists like Man Ray and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy who utilized abstraction to react to the materialism of the 1920s and the horrors of World War I. In our current cultural climate, I see your work as a reaction to the fast-paced urgency of urban life and the looming environmental consequences of an industrialized world. I also see you pushing against the ubiquity and instant gratification of digital photography.

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TB: How do you think you established this meticulous way of seeing the natural world?

KM: I think it began with an assumed animism that I learned from my parents and from the nature I grew up in—essentially the belief that everything is alive. This worldview is very common in other cultures, particularly indigenous cultures, but seems odd within our context. My parents were both ethnobotanists and they had absorbed this way of seeing from the cultures and traditions they studied. If you extend the idea of a landscape being alive then you can begin to ask questions such as: What is the character of this place? What are its desires and motivations? And how are those reflected in all the organisms and forms within it? This line of questioning is very productive for an artist.

TB: Did you ever make straight photographs?

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KM: Sure. People often refer to my work as abstract, but most of it is extremely indexical. I think my newest work, Automatic Earth, does what you’re proposing. The prints are “photographic rubbings,” which is a term I made up. These “rubbings” are essentially photograms made by hand-embossing light sensitive paper into surfaces in the landscape—crumbling cement, cross-sections of trees, and cracks in the earth—and then exposing them to light so the image of the texture is fixed. I often piece these prints together to create fictional forms and large installations. In the case of the tree rings, each tree is actually an archive, a historical and ecological record of how time passes in a particular place.

KM: Yes, but I stopped about nine years ago.

I was looking for a kind of transformation and visual freedom that I wasn’t finding anymore in straight photography. I wanted to recover the feeling I had for photography as a teenager—the feeling of sliding paper into developer and having no idea what it was going to look like. Alchemy, rather than replication, was what I was craving.

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TB: Well, I’d say you’re extending that legacy of working in wild places.

For me, a lot of your recent work uses the natural world as a depository that you re-purpose photographically. Do you agree?

KM: I’m glad you see it that way. An art idea is first a prescription for the artist who makes it and then for the viewer who sees it. My ideas are often prescriptions for me to go spend long, slow, uncomfortable amounts of time in nature and almost always in the dark. That must be what I need or maybe it’s the way I do my reckoning as a reaction to our current way of life. It’s my hope that the physical relationship I have with the materials, and the role manual labor plays in this work, gives it a sort of rawness and sensuality that a digital photograph may not have.

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Klea McKenna, Rain Study (Kona) #56, 2014 from the series Rain Studies Unique gelatin silver photogram of rain Courtesy of the artist and Von Lintel Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

KM: Now, let’s talk about The North Fork, the project that you’ve been working on in Colorado. You’ve been going to the town of Paonia, which is also coincidentally where my dad grew up. Without knowing it, I think that connection might be what drew me to your photographs. Can you talk about what brought you there?

TB: In the beginning it was this search for a familial connection. I had not seen my aunt, uncle, or cousins, who lived in Paonia, in almost 20 years. I had fond memories of visiting them as a boy and even as an adult I was enamored by the thought of them living off the land in a large tent in the Rocky Mountains. Unfortunately, after only a few visits in the early 1990s, my dad and my uncle had a falling out, which is why I hadn’t been back.

However, in a strange way, that fracture was a blessing for my own creativity.

KM: It gave you all this room to imagine the valley rather than to have a real relationship with it…

TB: Yeah. I had developed this mythical image of the North Fork and I had this insatiable need to see the valley for myself.

KM: While looking at your North Fork pictures, I have noticed many of the people are in moments of pause or puzzlement. They appear as if they are trying to understand something, and I can’t help but see them as surrogates for you in this process of trying to solve this family puzzle.

TB: Sure. I view many of the people in my pictures as guides who have helped me with this work. Also, I think “the pause” in these pictures points to a slower perception of time—a kind of rural time when viewed in a predominately urban world.

KM: I can see you’re focused on changing light and seasons, too. It also seems like some of the people in your pictures are responding to light, which is a beautiful circle. Can you talk more about how you’ve made time a subject?

TB: Exactly. Light itself can be moment-driven.

For example, if I think of the tent my cousins lived in I can distinctly remember the radiant glow inside of it. Some of my North Fork pictures actually reference that luminousness.

not imbued with the same type of running time that we experience in our daily

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KM: Like a flash…

Many of our memories are

lives. Instead, we often

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TB: Sure. If you think about it, many of our memories are not imbued with the same type of running time that we experience in our daily lives. Instead, we often remember a snippet of a larger scene that gets pared down to a moment.

remember a snippet of a larger scene that gets

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pared down to a moment.

left Trent Davis Bailey, Scrim, Paonia, Colorado, 2014 top right Trent Davis Bailey, Izzi and Cece, Hotchkiss, Colorado, 2014 bottom right Trent Davis Bailey, Tarp, Paonia, Colorado, 2015 all from the series The North Fork, courtesy of the artist and Robert Koch Gallery, San Francisco, CA

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For me there's something profound about the dust, scratches, and stations—the debris—that have accumulated on these negatives depicting the crash.

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both Trent Davis Bailey, Source material from the Sioux City Journal archive, (Sioux City, Iowa, July 19, 1989), 2016 courtesy of the artist and Sioux City Journal, Sioux City, IA

TB: Yes, but I’m still grappling with what form the archive will take. Earlier this year, I reached out to Tim Hynds, Chief Photographer at the Sioux City Journal, who confirmed that the newspaper had an archive of materials related to the crash: black-and-white 35mm negatives, newspaper clippings, and related ephemera. I’ve since scanned most of the negatives from the archive, which are the prints you’re looking at now.

KM: Working with archival and found material and integrating it with one’s own photographs is it’s own formal and conceptual challenge.

How are you finding your voice in them?

TB: As of now, I’m taking into account the existing formal qualities of the archive, and I’m thinking about the delivery of the material. For me, there’s something profound about the dust, scratches, and stains—the debris—that have accumulated on these negatives depicting the crash.

Additionally, there are some incredibly touching human moments, which I love, as well as these mundane pictures that don’t seem to serve any particular news context. It’s also unique that I can look at these exposures representing the last minutes of my mom’s life.

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H O U STO N C E N T E R F O R P H OTO G R A P H Y

TB: Yes. With this new project, I’m considering my unusual connection to Sioux City, Iowa, a municipal center situated on the banks of the Missouri River. On July 19, 1989, my mom and my two brothers left Denver on a family vacation and boarded United Airlines Flight 232 bound for Chicago. They were on their way to meet my dad and me on the East Coast, but halfway to Chicago, the plane malfunctioned and lost control of an engine and all of its hydraulics. With disabled maneuverability, the pilots attempted an emergency landing at Sioux Gateway Airport, but sadly, the plane landed askew, spiraled violently, broke apart, and burst into flames.

Miraculously more than half the passengers survived, including my two brothers, but many died, including my mom. For me, that day is both a tragedy and a miracle. In response, I’m embarking on a new project where I’m using Sioux City as my point of departure.

KM: So, this work combines your photographs in the present day with archival images from 1989?

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KM: Tell me about your newest project, which seems to embrace an investigative way of observing. Can you briefly describe it?

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TB: Exactly. There are several iconic pictures that have been widely circulated. Those pictures are ingrained in my personal memory and have influenced the collective memory of the crash. In fact, this is probably the most well known picture by photojournalist Gary Anderson, which shows Lt. Co. Dennis Neilson carrying a little boy. That boy happens to be my twin brother, Spencer who was not quite four years old. It’s difficult and eerie to see him in such an unconscious state and at a time when I wasn’t old enough to have a memory of him. When this picture was published it was tightly cropped and vertically oriented. Seeing it opened up and unedited like this, along with the rest of the archive, has broadened my viewpoint.

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KM: Where do you see this project going next?

TB: Overall, I see this project as an opportunity for me to reframe the crash. Even though I wasn’t onboard Flight 232, it significantly shaped my life. And I know I’m not alone in this: thousands of others have also been directly or indirectly affected. I intend to connect with them, collect stories, and see where this work leads me.

There’s solidarity and vulnerability in our shared connection that I’d like to make visible. n

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KM: Looking at this selection makes me think that when something newsworthy happens we only see the cover image, a headline and text, and maybe a few supporting pictures, but the depth of reporting goes far beyond what the public sees. It would be my guess that only a handful of these were published, right?

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both Trent Davis Bailey, Source material from the Sioux City Journal archive, (Sioux City, Iowa, July 19, 1989), 2016 courtesy of the artist and Sioux City Journal, Sioux City, IA

The Photographer’s Lament: An Interview with Alison Rossiter

by Keliy Anderson-Staley

Alison Rossiter is well known for her conceptual work using expired photographic papers. Her photographs are in the collections of major public institutions including the Art Institute of Chicago; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Minneapolis Institute of the Arts; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Milwaukee Art Museum; the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; the Center for Creative Photography, Tucson; and the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Rossiter is represented by Yossi Milo Gallery in New York and Stephen Bulger Gallery in Toronto.

Recently, four images from Rossiter’s series Lament were included in the exhibition, The Surface of Things, curated by Keliy Anderson-Staley at the Houston Center for

Traditionally, when a photographer has seen a box of silver gelatin paper, they have been excited by its potential—but usually as a vehicle for the images they’ve captured in a camera. Your work invites us to think about the paper itself. You buy boxes of old, expired paper, and restore them from oblivion. This paper has become both your medium and your subject. What first drew you to expired paper, and why do you keep coming back to it?

Could you talk about your connection to photo paper—its materiality, our changing relationship to it, its properties as an artistic medium?

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Alison Rossiter, Agfa Brovira Royal White, expired March 1940, processed 2013. Fragment of irregular size, 7 × 6.25 courtesy of the Yossi Milo Gallery

Alison Rossiter: My work with old photographic papers began in 2007 with a box of Eastman Kodak Kodabromide E3, stamped with an expiration date of May, 1946. It came as an unexpected gift from an eBay seller who added it to my purchase of outdated sheet film. The first print I developed straight out of the box with no exposure to light, looked as if someone had rubbed graphite across the surface of a textured piece of paper, not unlike a Vija Celmins drawing. Age had degraded the emulsion, giving the print a distinct pattern. I had stumbled upon a way to capture substantial imagery made by the passage of time and to record the deterioration of a manufactured product.

Early photographic papers are undeniably beautiful. The quality of the paper stock, the surface texture, and the colors of the tones differ from the lesser materials available to me as a photography student in 1970. Optical brighteners introduced in the 1950’s changed the appearance of highlights forever. Papers from the first half of the twentieth century have a subtlety all their own. Through my extensive collection of expired photographic papers I now know what I have missed.

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Keliy Anderson-Staley: As someone interested in photographic processes and the rapidly changing nature of photography, I’ve been following your work for a long time. Your photographs are beautiful and profound. They even point toward something transcendent or sublime. The raw material of much of your work, though, is quite humble—photo paper.

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Photography. Rossiter spoke with Anderson-Staley about her work and practice.

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The papers have quietly endured decades of world events, and development is an act of completion to their original task.

AR: My first approach is to process the papers as I find them, with no exposure to light, no folding, no tearing. I look for subtle latent images formed by atmospheric pollutants, moisture, or physical damage. Oil from a fingerprint behaves like a light exposure, and when developed, the mark looks like a black ink smudge. Two photographers touched the same piece of paper in darkrooms decades apart. My second method is the selective development of portions of the paper. I make these images deliberately by dipping the sheets into developer to form distinct lines or pouring the chemistry onto the emulsion surface and allowing it to pool. Each paper presents the problem of how to use it to its maximum advantage. This dilemma appears with every darkroom session.

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AR: I think of the span between the expiration and the development dates as a timeline through history. The papers have quietly endured decades of world events, and development is an act of completion to their original task.

KAS: For some of your works you expose and process the paper as a sheet. There may be fingerprints or dings in the paper or other accidental signs of time passing. Other works are manipulated in some way—rolled or dipped deliberately in chemistry. There is a great deal of discovery involved in both methods for you, I imagine. I am wondering whether certain materials invite certain kinds of processing and if you could talk about the role of experimentation in your work.

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KAS: Precision is crucial in the titling of your works. You identify the paper brand and type, the approximate year it was manufactured and the year you processed it. There remains a gap between those dates, a time when the paper was sitting around in storage somewhere, before you brought it back to life, before you used it for its original purpose, which is to expose it to light. What are your thoughts about that gap in time?

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Alison Rossiter, Eastman Kodak Velox, expired May 1922, processed 2013. Silver gelatin prints, 5.5 x 3 each. Triptych courtesy of the Yossi Milo Gallery

Very little information can suggest imagery.

The illusion of a landscape, or of a geometric shape with weight and volume, comes from a few gestures in a developer tray.

KAS: Some of your photographs are like formalist abstract constructions, others almost slide into the realm of the representative—they seem to suggest landscapes or other forms.

We maybe can’t help seeing a landscape, but this is our eyes (and their training to photographic conventions) tricking us. It seems crucial, though, that viewers bring their own perspectives to the interpretation of your works. Could you speak a bit about what role, if any, you see played by the viewer in the completion of the work’s meaning?

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Alison Rossiter, Eastman Kodak Contrast Process Panchromatic, develop before May 1961, 2010, 10 x 8, unique silver gelatin print courtesy of the Yossi Milo Gallery

Photograms taught me about the capability of photographic tonality. The object chosen for the photogram and the appearance of the background are equally important. The re-exposure to light during development produces tones that only light sensitive silver materials can render.

This intrinsic photographic image is a marvel of reactions. I see the beauty of swaths of gray. The shadow of chemistry contributes to the idea of disappearance. The delicate white outline of the sheet of film is created by extreme exposure to light. The result is greater than the sum of its parts.

My photograms of expired sheet films are the link to my use of expired photographic papers. One body of work leads to another.

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H O U STO N C E N T E R F O R P H OTO G R A P H Y

KAS: At the Houston Center for Photography, you showed four images from the series, Lament. They are photograms of expired unprocessed sheet film. You wrote about the works, “The notch code in the upper right hand corner indicates what type of film it is to the photographer in total darkness. It is a twentieth century photographer’s form of braille. I wanted to make a body of work that acknowledges the loss of the materials and the system.

The gray background allows the gray object to disappear gradually, just like the films I once used.” What are some of the differences for you in working with film versus paper? Is there a significant difference for you between your photograms and your works that present the paper itself?

AR: During my years of camera work with film I isolated individual objects with carefully chosen backgrounds to extract new meaning for the thing at hand. If my early works were to be viewed with my current work, a distinct similarity of simplicity would be apparent. From photographing objects I eventually arrived at the photographic print as an object itself.

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AR: Very little information can suggest imagery.

The illusion of a landscape, or of a geometric shape with weight and volume, comes from a few gestures in a developer tray. A horizontal line fools me into seeing a place. A mid-tone gray area lets me see an object with dimension. It is this simple perception that I find so astonishing. I welcome all interpretations.

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left Alison Rossiter, Fuji Gaslight, exact expiration date unknown, ca. 1920s, processed 2009 (G.) right Alison Rossiter, Fuji Gaslight, exact expiration date unknown, ca. 1920s, processed 2009 (H.) courtesy of the Yossi Milo Gallery

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AR: If my work sparks a sense of loss and remembrance of people, I am pleased that it has a reach beyond the investigation of materials.

Loss is certainly the premise of the Lament photograms. Responses to death are personal and varied, depending upon circumstance. On a wall above a work counter in my New Jersey studio I have photographs of long-deceased people and animals. To my mentor I mutter periodically, “I’m working;” to my father and mother, “I’m alright;” to the animals, repeatedly, “Thank you.” The images are there to remind me of the strength of past experience and the future need to put my shoulder to the wheel. Photographs have power like no other catalyst I know.

KAS: Thank you for your time and for sharing your work with our readers.

left Alison Rossiter, Eastman Kodak Kodabromide F1, expired June 1948, processed 2013. Silver gelatin print, 7 x 5 right Alison Rossiter, Eastman Kodak Velvet Velox, expired May 1945, processed 2013, (A.). Silver gelatin print, 5 x 7

AR: Thank you for allowing me to attempt to explain. I am grateful. n

The disappearance of silver materials and processes is inevitable. The film photograms are a wave of farewell to an extraordinary experience.

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AR: The Lament photograms are a tribute to my twentieth-century photographic education.

I learned the systems of silver-based photography and savored film names like Super XX Pan, Panatomic X, and Verichrome Pan. I could load film holders in total darkness swiftly with confidence. I plotted characteristic curves with densitometer readings. Photography was another language and an acquired skill. The disappearance of silver materials and processes is inevitable. The film photograms are a wave of farewell to an extraordinary experience.

KAS: When I see these images, I can’t help but think about carbon, especially because of the gray tones, or think about ashes. What you describe is a feeling of loss I think many photographers who grew up in the darkroom share. I am wondering how you might respond to me and others who read into this work ideas of mourning, thoughts of people we’ve lost or death in general?

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KAS: In the Lament photograms, the edges of the film stand out sharply. They become monumental forms, almost like grave markers.

Other writers have noted the elegiac tone in your work, and you are able to extract a great deal of emotional weight from your materials.

In calling this work “Lament,” the loss of the photographer’s art and photography’s connection to the darkroom becomes a metaphor for other kinds of loss, or for loss in general. Could you speak to this symbolic dimension of the work and the idea of loss in your work?

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Framing and Re-framing

A Conversation between Sherwin Rivera Tibayan and Lauren Fulton

photography) with conceptual art. Tibayan’s projects focus on such works as Jeff Wall’s commonly-cited essay “Marks of

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Indifference,” and Robert Frank’s book, The Americans—the

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latter through an examination of the histogram data of each work presented in Frank’s publication. Tibayan took this seminal work and, using digital means, dissected and translated the overlooked components that went into Frank’s production. The Histograms won the Society for Photographic Education’s 2012 Award for Innovations in Imaging in Honor of Jeannie Pearce.

“...photography largely serves as a term for me to identify those moments when I pay special attention to how the body—mine or a someone else’s—is permitted to move through and respond to something...”

For ACRE, you expanded Index beyond the original four pieces that have shown at various spaces, including The Reading Room in Dallas where I was first introduced to your work. This version features subject headings (China, Surrealism, Kodak, etc.). The project, like “The Histograms” and others, rids us of the common idea that photography only pertains to imagery, or image-making; instead you exploit the performative element that can be, and often is, involved in photography. For example, your process for Marks of Indifference–blacking out Wall’s essay you reproduced from the original catalogue, with a marker and recording the time it took to do so—is certainly a performance-based process. Would you mind talking about this and how it plays into you identifying as a photographer?

Sherwin Rivera Tibayan: I do identify myself as a photographer. Early on, picking up a camera felt like the most direct and meaningful way for me to respond to my frustrations, anxieties, and curiosities. It helped me think about how a device could frame who or what is included or excluded in the world. This simple physical reaction of picking up a camera has since grown into a fundamental

part of how I understand photography. It’s probably too broad and nebulous a way of describing it, but photography largely serves as a term for me to identify those moments when I pay special attention to how the body—mine or a someone else’s—is permitted to move through and respond to something (physical, emotional, institutional, conceptual, etc.), with or without a camera.

This is certainly the case with Marks of Indifference.

I wanted to find a way to act out the possible experiences of a reader trying to make sense of this influential text on photography. It seemed like my movement could be a way to record pathways of comprehension, bewilderment, and indifference. So, I marked through Wall’s text with a sharpie, blacking out his words as you mentioned, but equally important, simultaneously highlighting them. The glossy magazine paper, combined with the thinness of the sharpie application, allowed the text to remain completely legible upon closer inspection. In drawing closer to or moving away from the image, the reader’s own movements traverse this process of legibility and illegibility, comprehension and incomprehension. Additionally, each printed and marked spread of the essay is followed by a spread of

Sherwin Rivera Tibayan, Index (v10), 2016, Pigment print on Dibond.

Image courtesy Matèria Gallery and Roberto Apa.

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practice merges photography (or more commonly, notions of

Lauren Fulton: We met in Chicago in May of last year during the installation of a show I organized for ACRE Projects, which included your work. You presented your series Index, literally an index of Susan Sontag’s classic book On Photography. Since we all know the function of a publication’s index I won’t describe it, but with this ongoing project you essentially explore and question what exactly defines historical importance and relevance.

The index offers a concise, bird’s-eye view of this—the canon of the history of photography that we’ve been taught for decades, and it covers about a century’s worth of figures and work. One thing that interests me is your deliberate choice to remove the text from the publication format, instead presenting it (sometimes) framed and hung side by side on a wall.

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Sherwin Rivera Tibayan lives and works in Austin, Texas. His

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Sherwin Rivera Tibayan, Spreads, from the series Marks of Indifference (2015).

Black marker on print-on-demand zine. Image courtesy the artist.

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Index wasn’t even supposed to be a project. I return to On Photography again and again, so I simply wanted a way to find references quickly.

I got the idea that I would just type it up into a document and that I could easily search for key words. I also believed typing and arranging an index would help me understand the work more thoroughly. That bright idea felt increasingly like lunacy as the document grew and I was spending too much time learning how to index a book! It only became a visual project when I asked myself if this index could exist away from the publication.

This question opened me up to thinking about photography’s own historical conceptualization as an index. Making work for the wall and fundamentally changing the scale of the physical encounter was a first step at removing it from these bounds. I’m still playing with adding and subtracting formal elements, asking how a viewer might move around the works, and trying to leverage my subjectivity onto this seemingly objective structure. It’s also another way of returning to something I found so fascinating while making Marks of Indifference: searching for that moment when the reader of a book becomes the viewer of a picture.

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Sherwin Rivera Tibayan, Untitled, from the series Best General View (2010). Pigment print.

Image courtesy the artist.

SRT: I was certainly thinking about Sugimoto’s theaters when I was working on Horror Vacui.

They are such meditative and beautiful works.

Mark Klett’s rephotographic projects took on a similar role with Best General View. I wasn’t aware of Josephson’s really smart, playful images until after I had finished Best General View, and later realized I had known one of his photographs from the cover of Stephen Shore’s The Nature of Photographs. Maybe it is one of those foundational images that just floats around in your head without an author, affecting things.

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This translation of complex text into simple line drawings is part of my long-standing preoccupation with reduction and repetition as strategies for turning photography and its complex histories into smaller, manageable situations. This was the same with The Histograms and Index. I worked on The Histograms because I was trying to understand exposure or, more accurately, the learned and inherited ideas of “correct” photographic exposure. Frank’s high contrast images became a funny way for me to see this problem—lyrical images reduced to blunt data—and provided me with new raw material: graphs that I could repeatedly arrange to form new pictures.

LF: You are framing and re-framing images and content from the past that remains very important and relevant to this day. As an extension of that, I know that not long before conceiving the series Best General View you wrapped up a project called Horror Vacui in which you photographed billboards while traveling across the Southwest. The signage was blank and your photographs resemble Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Theaters. With Best General View though, you weren’t manipulating the camera shutter to create this “blankness,” like Sugimoto, and were instead photographing boards lacking any content. This body of work sort of naturally led to Best General View, which began with thousands of slides purchased off eBay. After weeding through and shrinking down your selection, you projected these on to a space using a projector screen as a new framing mechanism, or maybe I would call it a disruption. The result mirrors Ken Josephson’s conceptual approach to his “Images Within Images,” which he began in the ’60s, and is very dramatic in its presentation.

What is the background for these works?

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white pages that record the sharpie marks bleeding through as line drawings—a personal effort at picturing a space for indifference.

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“I think moments in a project when visual and conceptual affinities show up—for myself or the viewer—are really encouraging. Maybe that means I’m moving away from something limited and insular, like an internal monologue, and am contributing to a full-bodied

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conversation with a plurality of voices.”

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I think moments in a project when visual and conceptual affinities show up—for myself or the viewer—are really encouraging. Maybe that means I’m moving away from something limited and insular, like an internal monologue, and am contributing to a full-bodied conversation with a plurality of voices. I hope I give the viewer a picture with enough room to determine that my point isn’t to make pictures like other photographers, but rather that their pictures helped give me a more precise and shared language to address photography. It’s a medium that invokes a feeling and sensibility for space and history, but also reduces or confuses our potential for seeing and imagining those same things again, only differently.

Horror Vacui and Best General View were specific efforts in this regard. I was looking for a contemporary picture of the American West, or more accurately, trying to record the compulsion to repeatedly transform that overly mythologized place, and our experience of it, into an image.

What desires and legacies were apparent in such a photograph? What structures and materials supported the way we see it? Especially in the case of Best General View, I wanted an opportunity to speculate on what might be hidden or obscured when we do eventually stand in one spot to take our photograph.

LF: Can you tell me about your choice of title, “Best General View?”

SRT: It’s a phrase I’d often seen as part of the titles to early survey photographs of the West. I was attracted to the confidence and definitiveness. Who gets to say that? What privileges go along with such a claim? Well, I wanted to say that too, but without the grandness. I began by removing the condition that in order to make a photograph of the West, I needed to go out into the world to get it. Instead, I bought this box of slides and had it delivered to my home, picked my favorites, cast them onto a wall with a projector placed at a height just a bit taller than me, stood in roughly one spot, and went on a trip with this anonymous photographer, sharing in the space of someone else’s photographs in order to make my own. n

Sherwin Rivera Tibayan, Untitled, from the series Best General View (2010). Pigment print.

Image courtesy the artist.

(Uncredited photographer) Southwestern Bell "PhotoTouch" telephone with multiple chromogenic print images of friends and family members. 1970s

In this interview I discuss with Kaplan her personal collection “pop photographica” (a term that she coined encompassing 3-d objects at the intersection of photography and popular culture). The collection is comprised of a diverse and fascinating selection of decorative and functional objects, often hand-made, usually three dimensional, far removed from the type of work that has traditionally been considered part of the canon of photographic history.

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Some readers of this essay might not immediately recognize the name Daile Kaplan, whom I interviewed via email for this article. But those same readers might very likely recognize her face and voice: Kaplan has been for eighteen years the photography expert on PBS’ television program “Antiques Roadshow.” She is always precise and articulate, her presence professional but never intimidating. (For the sake of full disclosure, I must reveal that I have known Kaplan for over twenty years and have spent a considerable amount of time looking at and discussing with her the collection this interview discusses.)

Kaplan is Vice President and Director of the Photographs and Photobooks Department at Swann Auction Galleries, where she has been employed for twenty-five years. She has written three books and numerous essays; participates frequently on panels where fine art and vernacular photography are the topics; and she is a photographer, collector, and curator.

There’s an awareness in the art world about how disciplines that once operated autonomously are now in dialog much of the time. Think of photography in relation to fashion, design, cinema, literature, folk art, or the decorative arts. There’s an authentic sense of excitement and discovery associated with the genre of vernacular photography where pictures are generally affordable and thought-provoking vs. fine art or iconic images associated with “the canon.”

I’m looking at ways to make photographic images more accessible, because they are so successful at enriching our lives and daily experiences. There’s a paradoxical nature to pop photographica insofar as the objects are often one-of-a-kind but the personal references are universal and familiar.

DK: From the beginning photography was a special experience. The daguerreotype was housed in a leather miniature-book-like case that was held in one’s hand. Almost immediately it was applied to fancy perfume bottles, gentlemen’s canes, fountain pens and other luxury good. As an industry, photograph was always something of an equal opportunity employer. In the 19th-century, daguerreotype studios operated by women were fairly common. And, with the introduction of Stieglitz’s fine art circle in the early twentieth century, artworks by women photographers were displayed and reproduced alongside those by their male counterparts.

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An Interview with Daile Kaplan with Ed Osowski

Daile Kaplan: I’m interested in the experience of photographic images in everyday life. [There is] a growing body of interdisciplinary curators and collectors (contemporary art, folk art, decorative arts, Americana, antiquarian rare books) examining materials that have historically been operating on the margins of the photographic canon. By this I’m referring to “vernacular photography” (19th- and 20th-century amateur snapshots, press photographs, commercial studio portraits, objects) in relation to fine art photography. Why? I guess you could say we’re all interested in making photography bigger.

EJO: I’m glad that you mentioned the canon.

I’m most familiar with that term and its implications through the writings of certain feminist and LGBTQ scholars who began to question in the 1970s where were the works of the “other” in the material being taught in most liberal arts programs. Yet you wouldn’t know this from the standard histories of photography. (I’m thinking of numerous editions of Beaumont Newhall’s significant book, The History of Photography: From 1839 to the Present.)

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New Ways of Understanding Visual Culture: Pop Photographica

Ed Osowski: Your collection offers a new way of interpreting photography. These wonderful objects, each of which integrates photographic images, seem to belong to a group of artworks championed by collectors who avoid labels or categories.

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DK: How about controversial? In the 1990s when I first started collection, my colleagues thought my tastes a bit odd. But now that we think of photography as part of visual culture, these objects have come to be embraced and exhibited by blue-chip institutions and private collectors.

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(Uncredited photographer) Period altar containing a hand-tinted albumen photograph of Chinese woman with bound feet inset into decorative wooden frame and base. 1880s, courtesy of Daile Kaplan

Horn (Uncredited Photographer), Green velvet pin cushion composed of a ram’s horn inset with silver print photographs of a man in military dress and woman that is cut out in a heart-shaped pattern. 1890s, courtesy of Daile Kaplan

DK: The key word is “hybrid,” which underscores a sense of mystery inherent to many of articles.

After all, we can only guess the backstory when the photographer and subject are uncredited.

The collection includes a panorama of articles, from elegant 14K earrings with daguerreotype portraits to colorful porcelain objects with transfer images of handsome men to freestanding photographic cut outs with cute images of kids to Cindy Sherman’s Limoges dinner service in which she appears as Madame de Pompadour.

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EJO: Your collection is catholic, one might say, in how it ranges from the hand-made object to what are factory made or mechanically produced objects, for example, fabrics printed with reproductions of scenes of New York City or dinner-ware with portraits or specific scenes.

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EJO: You’ve been describing what I would call “high” or “fine art” photography. But belt-buckles, purses, shirts, campaign pins, glass paperweights, sewing kits, biscuit tins, jewelry—the list of disparate items that find home in your collection is staggering. You celebrate the opposite. What comes to mind is how Susan Sontag’s “Notes on ‘Camp,” her 1964 essay, argues for a mixture of the high with the low, the work of the insider with the work of the outsider, and celebrates objects that might seem beyond the arena of scholarly discussion. Almost anarchic I think.

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EJO: I’d like to discuss several specific objects in your collection towards which I have always gravitated. The first one is an image by Ansel Adams on the unlikely surface of a Hills Bros. coffee can produced in 1969. It features his photograph, Winter Morning, Yosemite Valley.

I can’t think of an object more unlikely to be displayed in a museum where framed images, usually mounted on white walls, dominate. How do ephemeral and disposable objects in your collection address those fine art objects sanctioned by cultural institutions?

DK: Photography has always been a chameleon-like form of expression in which context is all-defining. The relationship of photography to popular expressions is reflected in fashion magazines that featured images by Richard Avedon and Irving Penn as well as this fun, quotidian object

by Adams. You may ask why Adams agreed to have one of his pictures featured on a coffee can.

He was a populist who recognized an opportunity.

He drew attention to photography (in a consumer setting) and also to Yosemite National Park, a landscape at risk more than 50 years ago.

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DK: The imagination, creativity and commercial opportunities utilized by photographers then help us understand today the ways in which pictures were assimilated into popular culture. Adams and mid-20th century photographers like Duane Michals, Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander and William Klein, whose pictures adorn numerous vinyl album covers from the 1970s, changed the way the public viewed photography. The result is the ubiquity of photographs and rise of visual culture.

top left (Ansel Adams) Hills Brothers coffee can, with a wraparound image of Adams’ Winter Morning, Yosemite Valley. Tin, 7 inches high and 6¼ in diameter (17.8 and 15.9 cm.), with the printed Hills Brothers and Adams credit and the date; with the original plastic top which reads “Head for the HILLS!” 1969, courtesy of Daile Kaplan bottom left (Uncredited photographer) World War I candy tin inset with a silver print photographic montage of a nun (her habit sculpturally folded and hand-painted), a photogram on silk, a handwritten inked inscription and a pearl-decorated cross.

Circa 1914, courtesy of Daile Kaplan

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EJO: Adams’ image on the three-pound coffee tin resembles the photographs he had printed on menu cards and souvenir sheets at Yosemite in the 1930s; they seem to be part of his larger ambition to make the public aware of photography. An artist in his own right, he employed photographs to convey the necessity of conserving and preserving the natural environment.

top right (Uncredited photographer) AfricanAmerican family tabletop curio made of woven lanyards, with 4 silver print photographs (2 are shown) of different family members, each with notations on prints verso. 1970s, courtesy of Daile Kaplan

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In the early 1960s, before a commercial market for fine art and documentary photographs was introduced in NY and San Francisco, photography was considered an illegitimate art form.

Even serious artists like Adams were limited in the potential audience for their works.

bottom right Artist: Elaine Huntsman. A mixed media artwork composed of broom with a Victorian strip of calico fabric and an original tintype. 1880s-1990s, courtesy of Daile Kaplan

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left (uncredited photographer) Beautiful hand-crafted wood sewing box with elaborate marquetry and secret drawers containing daguerreotypes and tintypes of family members set into the inside top lid. 1850s, courtesy of Daile Kaplan top right D08 (Uncredited photographer) Southwestern Bell “PhotoTouch� telephone with multiple chromogenic print images of friends and family members. 1970s, courtesy of Daile Kaplan bottom right D21 Curio (Uncredited photographer)Ovoid shaped reverse-painted glass object inset with albumen photographs of a husband and wife. 1890s, courtesy of Daile Kaplan

The notion that photography was something of an interdisciplinary art form and crossed over into the decorative arts in the 1860s demonstrates how the boundaries between the fine and applied arts were always a bit fuzzy. In other words, for the consumer and popular tastes, the idea wasn’t to display photographs on the wall but to integrate them into everyday life. This “off-the-wall” sensibility associated with pop photographica (and, yes, I mean that literally and figuratively) keys in to its emergence and popularity.

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EJO: I’d like to finish this interview by discussing one of the most touching or moving or, perhaps beautiful items in the collection. I could have chosen pillow cases that highlight cyanotype images of the maker’s life or the amazing trunk used by an African-American vaudeville performer. I’m referring to what I hesitate to call an example of “low art.” It is the stuffed doll of a young African-American girl/baby with a haunting photographic portrait applied to it. An object like this one strikes me immediately as something that contains a quality one cannot see but can “feel.” It’s fleeting, marked by what I am going to call love.

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001---6 (Uncredited photographer) African-American cotton rag doll with photographic image of a child's face. 1880s, courtesy of Daile Kaplan

EJO: Discussing the precious, unique, handmade object moves us into territory which Walter Benjamin analyzes in his 1936 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Should we move on to topics that he introduces?

DK: Benjamin was especially interested in integrating mass and consumer culture into modernist discourse. He articulated a new way of seeing in which a photographic images were essential. The relationship of pop photographica to popular and mass culture is a key element in addressing the origins and manifestations of these objects. In the focus to gain approval for photography as a fine art form, artifacts that fell outside the canon were unilaterally dismissed and ridiculed for decades. Today such objects are being reexamined by curators as important ways to better understand the role of images in everyday live. n

— This email interview with Daile Kaplan was conducted on several occasions, Sept. 4, Oct. 1, and Oct. 16, 2016. For more information please visit her website: www.popphotographica.com She will be opening the Warehouse Museum of Pop Photographica in the spring of 2017.

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DK: This functional item is one of the first major pieces I acquired. The beautifully crafted wooden box reflects how photography studios often worked with local craftsmen and artisans. When open the top lid reveals daguerreotypes and tinypes of family members, who are set against the stunning marquetry and artisanal quality of the object. As someone (a woman) engaged in a quotidian task—sewing or mending—she connected with her loved ones via the portraits.

DK: Yes yes yes…this is a poignant object that probably depicts a child who has passed on. The doll possesses a soulfulness that seems to animate it. The expression on the child’s face is so wistful and wise beyond her years. If you saw a framed photograph of her face on the wall, you would certainly stop and look. But as a tangible object the rag doll is so much more powerful an experience because we touch and cradle it. The object provided an emotional connection to her for family members and friends. That it has survived and has the power to allow viewers today to connect is kind of incredible.

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EJO: Can we talk about the Victorian sewing box within the framework of your collection?

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Every year I buy my wife a jigsaw puzzle for her birthday. It’s fun to watch her put one together, making sense of its disparate pieces as she goes along.

It occurred to me while studying Frank Hamrick that his photobooks are like that—handheld, visual puzzles that reveal themselves as we absorb the pictures on their pages.

Frank Hamrick 2017 HCP Fellowship Recipient

“I am a photographer, but not just a photographer” is how he described himself when we first met. And that’s what makes his approach unique and pleasurable. Frank’s passion is the handmade artist book, which allows him to marry his imagemaking with his other creative pursuits: writing, papermaking, letterpress, paper staining. The man does it all. By hand, no less. It’s impressive and the results are breathtaking.

There’s a deliberate slowness to the way he works and he wants us to take our time uncovering the meaning in his images too. Hamrick’s aim is to make us think, to contemplate the pieces, and see how they fit together. He’s right: solving a good puzzle is hard work. It’s rewarding too, and that’s the point.

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2017 Carol Crow Memorial Fellowship Recipient

The people in Jan Rattia’s photographs are beautiful. They’re sexy, chiseled, Adonis-like beefcakes who make their living dancing onstage at male strip clubs. And, like their dance, which is an orchestrated, erotic illusion, these men aren’t as they appear (or as we assume them to be): they’re straight, confident, working people, making an honest living with the gifts they’ve been given.

It’s not the story we expect when we talk about strippers. That tension—what we think we see in a picture versus what it actually depicts—is what inspires Rattia’s work.

Jan’s images are by turns painterly and cinematic. He shoots in a documentary style though, by his own admission, his images are anything but. For him, the photograph is a fictional construction made in collaboration with his sitters. He’s not aiming to document the lives of these men—he wants to know them and understand what makes them tick. It turns out that, for most of them, the motivation is attention and the desirous gaze of the spectator: their offstage audience, this photographer, and, ultimately, you and me.

— Andy Adams, juror flakphoto.com

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Jan Rattia

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— Andy Adams, juror flakphoto.com

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35th Annual Juried Membership Exhibition CALL FOR ENTRIES Recent Acquisitions to the John Cleary Library John Cleary (1937–2008)

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Houston Center for Photography’s John Cleary Library is home to more than 3,800 books on photography and related subjects. Originally, the library primarily housed books that were reviewed in spot magazine, but it has since grown to be a comprehensive reference library on photography.

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The John Cleary Library includes monographs, surveys, exhibition catalogs, instructional books, periodicals, and self-published artist books. Its home in HCP’s Learning Center is a comfortable place where all are welcome to enjoy photography in book form and share John Cleary’s passion for photography. The library is free and open to the public during HCP gallery hours and by appointment, and you can browse our collection online by visiting: www.librarything.com/profile/HCPonline John was an avid photography collector and dealer; self-educated and highly-devoted, John helped to propel Houston’s photographic connoisseurship. His gallery, which was located very close to HCP, was a renowned Houston institution that was celebrated for its vintage and timeless contemporary photographs. John’s legacy includes more than 1,200 images of children (known as his “Kid Collection”) and several thousand books on photography.

On Susan Burnstine’s Absence of Being: In a world dominated by talk of megapixels and image resolution, Burnstine’s Absence of Being is like a breath of fresh air. Burnstine utilizes homemade and toy cameras as well as single element lenses to create soft focus and vignettes in her photographs. Though each photograph is a real landscape or actual place, her ethereal images arrest the viewer and suspend them in a world that exists only in her mind and through her lens.

—Japheth Storlie, HCP’s Education Coordinator Burnstine, Susan, Absence of Being, Damiani Editore, Bologna, Italy, 2016

Call for entries opens: March 3, 2017

Deadline: April 21, 2017 Juried by Rebecca Senf, Chief Curator, Center for Creative Photography, Norton Family Curator, Phoenix Museum of Art

Liz Hickok (San Francisco, CA), Preternatural, 2015, from the series Ground Waters, sublimation print on aluminum, 16 x 32 inches, courtesy of the artist

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FOTO RELEVANCE HCP’s 2016–2017 supporters

editors Ashlyn Davis Caroline Docwra

spot is published twice yearly, in conjunction with the fiscal year of Houston Center for Photography. Subscriptions are free to HCP members.

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