Issuu

SUSAN DOBSON Slide Library

Introduction Susan Dobson Essay “The Things We Keep” Alison Nordström

Michael Gibson Gallery May 3 - 26, 2018

What Remains C-Print From Digital File, 2018 Edition of 5 40 x 54 in / 101.6 x 137.2 cm

Susan Dobson on the Slide Library The photographs in this exhibition come from two slide collections that are in the process of being dismantled. One collection focuses on art (both contemporary and historical), while the other mostly contains slides about photography. I have a personal connection to both collections, having used both for teaching and research. When exploring the slides, I noticed that these resources had not been updated in a while, having become obsolete decades ago. The paper paraphernalia separating the slides had yellowed; the methods of classification were outdated; many slide labels used politically incorrect terminology, and there were no updates to reflect recent changes to world geographies. Most of the works pre-dated 1990 – just before the use of digital images became more widespread. For this reason, the photograph that depicts the collection of slides documenting the pages of the book “Photography After Photography,” seems particularly prescient. For this exhibition, I chose to focus primarily on the material aspect of these slide collections. My photographs form yet another generation in the life cycle of material reproduction. I photograph with film, and I make physical prints of analogue slide collections that contain reproductions of photographs that were themselves reproduced in books. To highlight this continuum, I chose at times to reference my working process in the images. For example, I purposefully included the window reflection of my electronic flash lighting, and I preserved the film rebate and processing marks in some images. Slide libraries used to be meeting places for researchers, where slides were physically handled. Fingerprints, smudges, and stains therefore become traces of the people who once handled the collection. The physical objects in these defunct slide libraries become, for me, memorials to artists, to researchers, to analogue photography, and to the life cycle of material objects generally. The aging and demise of these resources is a poignant reminder of Roland Barthes’ musing on the photograph, in which he points out that the photograph, like a human being, has a limited life: “Like a living organism, it is born on the level of the sprouting silver grain, it flourishes a moment, then ages…Attacked by light, by humidity, it fades, weakens, vanishes; there is nothing left to do but throw it away.” (Barthes, Camera Lucida. p. 93)

Photographers A - Z C-Print From Digital File, 2018 Edition of 5 40 x 65 1/2 in / 101.6 x 166.6 cm

The Things We Keep Alison Nordström Susan Dobson’s Slide Library is a meditation on both past and future. She considers the now almost forgotten technologies by which we once consumed photographic images, while asking us to think about the meanings various photographic objects will hold in years to come. Marshall McLuhan is correct that the ways we see must inevitably shape what we know, and this tribute to the tiny luminous rectangles that once embodied certain histories of art, marks a chance to think back on the means, content, structures and practices that got us to where we are, while looking forward to how the next generations will know what they know and make what they make. More than those of most artistic disciplines, the histories of photography have often been presented as a history of photographic technology. Indeed it is tempting to understand changes in image making over time as an inexorable march of progress, each innovative step a move towards greater ease and economy that also easily embraces the casual discarding of the suddenly obsolete processes that preceded it. Some of these methods, while certainly no longer au courant, remain accessible among the wide choice of arrows in the artist’s quiver, offering, sometimes, the exact look and emotional nuance the artist seeks. Thus, Chuck Close makes stunningly monumental and dynamic daguerreotype portraits, Sally Mann depicts historical sites within the Old South’s landscape in flawed wet collodion images on glass, and Christian Marclay uses archaic media to document other archaic media in his Cassette Tape series of cyanotypes. Daguerreotype, collodion and cyanotype are pre-industrial processes, a return to the craft of the handmade singular object. Color slide manufacture, on the other hand, required teams of workers and dedicated factory buildings enclosing huge machines capable of coating a mile long run of film base with three separate color-sensitive emulsions. The materiality of the slide and the process by which it is consumed is as complex as its manufacture. The non-substantive film itself, with its visible texture of a relief image on

the emulsion side, is thin enough to ensure a jewel-like luminosity unrivaled by the digital projections of today. The mount may be cardboard, plastic, metal or glass, and can be numbered, labeled, written on or otherwise marked. The mechanism that both stores and organizes them may be a plastic or metal carousel or a slide stack tray. The distinctive system by which multiple slides are viewed serially, requires a projector, a screen, and a darkened room, leading to a performative and time-based experience that is somewhere between still photographs and movies. The projector requires electricity, and bulbs that are, now, increasingly difficult to find. Over time, the slides accrue marks of their use: dust, fingerprints, scratches, even burns and melt marks from being projected too long. There are eight ways these little rectangles can be inserted into their slot in a carousel; only one is correct. The projector can jam, break or otherwise malfunction. Slides are slow to process, and expensive to duplicate. When Eastman Kodak stopped manufacturing Kodachrome in 2009, it marked the end of making and experiencing these greatly magnified, high resolution, sharp and accurately colored images. The culture had moved on anyway. Families no longer gathered in the dark for slide shows of birthdays and holidays. Photojournalists found faster, less expensive ways to capture color. Teachers, in particular, were quick to embrace the ease, economy and versatility of digital files that were easily Photography After Photography C-Print From Digital File, 2018 Edition of 5 19 x 24 in / 48.3 x 61.5 cm

made, instantly available, and could be situated within several lectures simultaneously. The distinctive sound that heralded a new image on the screen---almost heartbeat-like in its two-part click and rumble---would be heard no more. The once-ubiquitous boxed carousel tray was relegated to Art Department storage closets where one might still sometimes find boxes of even more anachronistic glass lantern slides. The file cabinets that stored and sorted copies of centuries of paintings and photographs were used less and less, eventually remaining unopened for months, and semesters, and years. This is the circumstance of the slides that Susan Dobson discovered in two Canadian art departments in 2016. She photographed them as objects, regardless of the images they carried, showing them as innumerable small fragments of knowledge, almost overwhelming in quantity and uniformity. She documented them as manifestations of systems of storage, organization, and thought, labeled and categorized by lecture topic, geography or artist. She photographed solid file cabinets and open drawers. The drawers and hanging files are dusty, conveying a sense of having been abandoned in place. Many are packed full, with further categorization indicated by the brightly coloured slips of paper inserted by the archivist to identify subjects by genre. Others, notably a drawer labeled “Africa Ceylon” holds barely 30 slides, all bordered in white, in a drawer meant to hold hundreds. It’s hard not to read this as a metaphor for the paucity of attention non-Western art receives in the standard North American curriculum. In this series, Dobson has also photographed plastic carousels of slides, from above and on a rich black background, thus emphasizing their formal qualities as well as their precisely formed mechanical nature. None of the carousels are full. Their lacunae suggest interrupted lectures, paused thoughts, and incomplete stories, as well perhaps, as the recontextualizing of a single slide by its removal from one carousel’s narrative and replacement in another. These relics are fraught with such associations for those of us who grew up with them, but it is important to note that Dobson is less concerned with presenting a nostalgia machine than she is with urging us to think about photography in

terms not of its technologies so much as of the things it has left behind. Most of the images in this series are printed large enough that we lose all sense of scale. The crooked stacks of worn slides within a dusty drawer become architectural. The carousel is a mandala that exceeds the width of our shoulders, becoming an unrecognizable artifact, as it will surely be to the next generations. Dobson’s coda image is small, a mere 8”x10” presented as a negative, with all tones in reverse, recapitulating the most photographic aspects of the medium’s analogue period. The image is of a tiny, lidded, almost transparent, plastic container, only a few inches high and clearly intended for preserving leftover food. It is packed full of perhaps a carousel’s worth of slides. As with Dobson’s other photographs, the images the slides carry cannot be made out, but one slide, held tightly against the container wall by the slides behind it, has a legible label: “Eastman, George. Unknown photographer with a No. 2 Kodak. Bathing, c.1888” It is, in fact, an icon in the history of photography, although (or because) it is a snapshot. It is the image on the cover of Beaumont Newhall’s fourth edition of The History of Photography, the self-confident singular article of the title heralding the monolithic version of the medium’s development that still dominates our knowledge today. This photograph shows a photographer photographing a photographer, as Dobson is a photographer photographing photographs of photographs. This small round brown picture that she chooses not to show is almost invariably the image on a slide used to illustrate the technical advance that democratized photography for good, establishing a social practice that leads directly to the Kodachrome slide and then past it, headlong, to what we have now.

Alison Nordström is an independent writer and curator specializing in photographs of all kinds. She is currently an Associate at the Peabody Museum, Harvard University, and a curator for the Triennial of Photography, Hamburg. She holds a PhD in Cultural and Visual Studies.

Eastman, George. Unknown Photographer with a No.2 Kodak. Bathing, c.1888 Pigment Print on Acetate, 2018, Edition of 5, 8 x 10 in / 20.3 x 25.4 cm C-Print From Digital File, 2018, Edition of 5, 40 x 50 in / 101.6 x 127 cm

India Iraq Israel Afghanistan Pakistan Cambodia Indonesia C-Print From Digital File, 2018 Edition of 5 20 x 23 in / 50.8 x 58.4 cm

slide drawers

Africa Ceylon C-Print From Digital File, 2016 Edition of 5 20 x 23 in / 50.8 x 58.4 cm

Islamic Maps C-Print From Digital File, 2018 Edition of 5 20 x 23 in / 50.8 x 58.4 cm

Eskimo Canadian Missionary Literature C-Print From Digital File, 2016 Edition of 5 20 x 23 in / 50.8 x 58.4 cm

North American Indian 2 C-Print From Digital File, 2016 Edition of 5 20 x 23 in / 50.8 x 58.4 cm

United States 61 Smith - Spence C-Print From Digital File, 2016 Edition of 5 20 x 23 in / 50.8 x 58.4 cm

US Architecture 75 Orwell - Washington D.C. C-Print From Digital File, 2016 Edition of 5 20 x 23 in / 50.8 x 58.4 cm

Eskimo 2 C-Print From Digital File, 2018 Edition of 5 20 x 23 in / 50.8 x 58.4 cm

Mexico Manuscripts C-Print From Digital File, 2016 Edition of 5 20 x 23 in / 50.8 x 58.4 cm

Karsh, Lake, Letendre C-Print From Digital File, 2017 Edition of 5 32 x 39 in / 81.3 x 100.1 cm

red tool cabinet series

Canada 2: Remnants C-Print From Digital File, 2018 Edition of 5 32 x 39 in / 81.3 x 100.1 cm

Burtynsky, Carr, Colville C-Print From Digital File, 2017 Edition of 5 32 x 39 in / 81.3 x 100.1 cm

Jolicoeur, Molinari, Notman C-Print From Digital File, 2017 Edition of 5 32 x 39 in / 81.3 x 100.1 cm

Artist Vocabulary Archival Pigment Print, 2018 Edition of 5 35 x 35 in / 88.9 x 88.9 cm

slide lectures

7 up LOGOS + GRAPHICS Archival Pigment Print, 2018 Edition of 5 35 x 35 in / 88.9 x 88.9 cm

Interviews and Moe Koffman Archival Pigment Print, 2018 Edition of 5 35 x 35 in / 88.9 x 88.9 cm

F.A. Slide Library #10 Archival Pigment Print, 2018 Edition of 5 35 x 35 in / 88.9 x 88.9 cm

Antiquarian Avant-Garde Archival Pigment Print, 2018 Edition of 5 35 x 35 in / 88.9 x 88.9 cm

Susan Dobson Biography Susan Dobson graduated with her MFA from the University of Guelph in 1997. Her work has been exhibited in major photography festivals such as CONTACT (Toronto), Fotoseptiembre (Mexico City), Images Festival (Vevey, Switzerland), Le Mois de la Photo (Montreal), Bitume/Bitumen (Brussels), and FotoNoviembre (Tenerife, Spain) as well as public gallery exhibitions across Canada, the US and Europe. Recent exhibitions include the 2017 Art Gallery of Windsor Triennial of Contemporary Art, feature exhibitions at Fotonoviembre 2017 (Tenerife, Spain), Images Festival (Vevey, Switzerland), and City Landscape at In Focus Gallery, Cologne, Germany. Extensively reviewed with articles in CV Photo, Harper’s, Photo Metro, Magenta Magazine, Prefix Photo and Border Crossings, Dobson’s work has also been published in Carte Blanche, a compendium of Canadian photography in 2006, and Massive Change, Bruce Mau’s 2004 primer on new inventions and technologies. In 2011, Dobson received a major grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada to fund a 4-year collaborative project with curator Alison Nordström of the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York. The group exhibition, Of Time and Buildings, which included Dobson’s work, was first shown at George Eastman House in March 2014 and travelled to the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre in 2015. Dobson’s photographs are in the corporate collections of BMO Bank of Montreal, Scotiabank and TD Bank Group as well as many public galleries including the National Gallery of Canada, Oakville Galleries, Swiss Museum of Photography, and the Tenerife Espacio de las Artes, Spain. She lives in Guelph, Ontario where she is Associate Professor at the University of Guelph.

SUSAN DOBSON Slide Library Catalogue of an exhibition held at the Michael Gibson Gallery May 3 - 26, 2018

Michael Gibson Gallery and Susan Dobson would like to thank Alison Nordström for her thought provoking essay on Susan Dobson’s photography Alison Nordström is an independent writer and curator specializing in photographs of all kinds. She is currently an Associate at the Peabody Museum, Harvard University, and a curator for the Triennial of Photography, Hamburg. She holds a PhD in Cultural and Visual Studies.

For Susan Dobson’s Curriculum Vitae please visit www.gibsongallery.com

Front Cover: detail of Eastman, George. Unknown Photographer with a No. 2 Kodak. Bathing c. 1888 Back Cover: detail of Photography After Photography

Michael Gibson Gallery 157 Carling St London On N6A 1H5 519.439.0451 1.866.644.2766