Susan Dobson "Viewfinder"

Susan Dobson Viewfinder

Susan Dobson Viewfinder

The Shadow on the Glass: On Susan Dobson’s Viewfinder Series

by Amish Morrell

Michael Gibson Gallery 2014

Daguerreotype Sixth Plate, circa 1848 Digital C-Print, 2014 Edition of 5 - 35 x 40 in / 89 x 102 cm

Edition of 5 - 47 x 54 in / 119.4 x 137 cm

The Shadow on the Glass: On Susan Dobson’s Viewfinder Series Amish Morrell Each image in Susan Dobson’s Viewfinder series depicts a scene of one of the Great Lakes; images that could just as easily be the Mediterranean Sea or the Atlantic Ocean and thus stand in for one of the most commonly depicted landscapes in art history. One of the images in the series, Daguerreotype Sixth Plate, circa 1848, depicts a sunset over the water, with a sharply delineated wharf, a lighthouse on the horizon and shallow water in the foreground. But in looking at this scene, one’s eye isn’t drawn into the receding space of the landscape, but to the markings from the ground glass of a daguerreotype camera that sit on the surface of the image, organizing and texturing the scene. Scanned and digitally superimposed over the image, scratches, smudges, and a finely etched oval float above the landscape so that one questions when and how this image was made.

Each image in the series shows a different image of water and sky, all taken with the same large-format view camera, but each overlaid with the ground glass of a different camera. And while the titles tell us nothing about where the images were taken, they tell us something about the ground glass in each image, all from cameras that date between 1848 and 1980. Most of these are from the George Eastman House in Rochester New York, and others have been borrowed from private collectors. While there is a geographical relationship between the subject matter and Dobson’s method for making these images (Rochester is located on one of the Great Lakes), the seascape functions primarily as a formal constraint. These images could be of any large body of water, at any point in time; a scene so ubiquitous that it could be called a “type,” which is the function it serves here, offering recognizable, seemingly timeless signifiers: a setting sun, a swimmer bobbing in

the waves, a sailboat or an uninterrupted horizon, what Roland Barthes described as the studium of the image; those details that convey information and make it both familiar and legible to the viewer [1].

The presence of the ground glass, however, reorients the viewer temporally, pointing to a time other than when the image was taken, so that the image becomes about something other than the scene it presents. The scratches on each ground glass, the grid, the name printed on the bottom all provide clues to the presence of an earlier photographer and to photographic processes now largely relegated to the museum. These traces wrench the image out of the realm of the pretty, the scenic or the merely interesting, and evoke what Barthes described as the punctum of the image, incidental details that have highly subjective and often indescribable poignancy for the viewer. They work to puncture or wound and wrest the image out of the merely symbolic, affirming one’s vulnerable connection to the physical world that it describes [2]. The punctum, however, is not merely a subjective apprehension of the real vis-à-vis the photograph, but can also describe a heightened consciousness of the photograph’s temporal character. Images are always made for the future, so we can remember, and yet they are always, as soon as they are made, of the past; they carry what Barthes described as a sense of “that-hasbeen” [3]. Dobson’s Viewfinder series evokes this future-anteriority of the punctum most poignantly, whereby the traces of the ground glass overlaying each seascape enact a “photographer’s punctum,” creating a sense of time doubling back on itself, so “thathas-been” becomes “once-again.”

This is highly effective because the ground glass inverts the position of the viewer in relation

to the seascape. Instead of looking out onto the scene, as one does with perspectival images, the three-dimensional scene is projected back to the viewer (who inhabits the same position as a long-departed photographer peering at the ground glass of a view camera) as a two-dimensional surface. Like Marcel Duchamp’s Etant donnes (19461968), an elaborate tableau he worked on towards the end of his life, where one peers at a reclining nude through peepholes cut into a doorway, the viewer is captured in the act of looking, and caught aware of their projective impulses. Inverting the position of the viewer and the subject of representation, the image is not about the scene depicted, but the subjective and temporal character of looking. This layering and inversion prevent us, as viewers, from seeing the image as transparent, as what Roland Barthes called “a message without a code,”[4] and makes visible what is described in psychoanalysis as the “screen,” where the social, ideological and temporal meanings of the image are projected and inscribed [5]. Looking at the scene as if through the ground glass of a 1940 Speed Graphic View Camera, or a 1923 Deardorff, or any of the cameras referenced in this series, the viewer glimpses the scene as an earlier photographer might have composed it, passing through their shadow.

Amish Morell, Editor of C Magazine and Director of Programs at C The Visual Art Foundation References: 1. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (New York: Hill & Wang, 1981), p. 27.

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid., p. 96.

4. Roland Barthes, “Rhetoric of the Image,” Image Music Text (New York: Hill & Wang, 1978), p. 16-17.

5. Margaret Iverson, “What is a Photograph?” Art History Vol. 17, No. 3 (September 1994).

Seneca 5x7 View Camera, circa 1940 Digital C-Print, 2013 Edition of 5 - 35 x 49 3/4 in / 89 x 126 cm Edition of 5 - 47 x 66 3/4 in / 119.4 x 169.5 cm

Toyo Field 45All, circa 1980 Digital C-Print, 2013 Edition of 5 - 35 x 49 3/4 in / 89 x 126 cm Edition of 5 - 47 x 66 3/4 in / 119.4 x 169.5 cm

Sanderson Tropical Field Camera Half Plate, circa 1920 Digital C-Print, 2014 Edition of 5 - 35 x 49 in / 89 x 124 cm Edition of 5 - 47 x 66 in / 119.4 x 168 cm

Rochester Empire State View Camera with reducing back, circa 1900 Digital C-Print, 2014 Edition of 5 - 35 x 44 3/4 in / 89 x 113.7 cm Edition of 5 - 47 x 60 in / 119.4 x 152.4 cm

Linhof 4x5, circa 1946 Digital C-Print, 2014 Edition of 5 - 35 x 43 1/2 in / 89 x 110.4 cm

Edition of 5 - 47 x 58 1/2 in / 119.4 x 149 cm

Anniversary Speed Graphic 4x5, circa 1940 Digital C-Print, 2014 Edition of 5 - 35 x 44 1/4 in / 89 x 112.4 cm

Edition of 5 - 47 x 59 1/4 in / 119.4 x 150.5 cm

Michael Gibson Gallery June 2014 Viewfinder Exhibition

Michael Gibson Gallery June 2014 Viewfinder Exhibition

5x7 Deardorff, circa 1965 Digital C-Print, 2013 Edition of 5 - 35 x 44 3/4 in / 89 x 113.7 cm

Edition of 5 - 47 x 60 in / 119.4 x 152.4 cm

Century Studio Camera with reducing back, circa 1925 Digital C-Print, 2013 Edition of 5 - 35 x 49 3/4 in / 89 x 126.4 cm

Edition of 5 - 47 x 66 3/4 in / 119.4 x 169.5 cm

John Stock & Company New York, Stereo Wet Plate Camera, circa 1866 Digital C-Print, 2014 Edition of 10 - 35 x 60 3/4 in / 89 x 154.3 cm

Cambo, circa 1950 Digital C-Print, 2014 Edition of 5 - 35 x 46 in / 89 x 116.8 cm Edition of 5 - 47 x 61 3/4 in / 119.4 x 156.8 cm

Deardorff, circa 1923 Digital C-Print, 2014 Edition of 5 - 35 x 44 3/4 in / 89 x 113.7 cm Edition of 5 - 47 x 60 in / 119.4 x 152.4 cm

Wista Technical Field Camera, circa 1980 Digital C-Print, 2014 Edition of 5 - 35 x 49 3/4 in / 89 x 126.4 cm Edition of 5 - 47 x 66 3/4 in / 119.4 x 169.5 cm

Susan Dobson: Biography Susan Dobson has always experienced the desire to connect with the world through the medium of photography. Known for her photographs of suburban culture, architecture and landscape, she is interested in the process of looking intently, whether through the window of a car or the viewfinder of her large-format Toyo Field camera.

Since graduating with her MFA from the University of Guelph in 1997, Dobson has exhibited in public galleries across Canada as well as in the United States and Europe. Her work has been exhibited in major photography festivals such as CONTACT (Toronto, Canada), Fotoseptiembre (Mexico City), Le Mois de la Photo (Montreal, Canada), Bitume/Bitumen (Brussels), and FotoNoviembre (Canary Islands).

Extensively reviewed with articles in CV Photo, Photo Metro, The Globe and Mail, Prefix Photo, and Border Crossings, Dobson’s work has 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 will travel to galleries in the US and Canada.

Dobson’s photographs are in the permanent collections of the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, Oakville Galleries, Art Gallery of Windsor, and the Portland Museum. She lives in Guelph, Ontario where she is Associate Professor, Photography Department Head, and MFA Program Coordinator at the University of Guelph.

Speed Graphic View Camera, circa 1940 Digital C-Print, 2013 Edition of 5 - 35 x 35 in / 89 x 89 cm

Edition of 5 - 47 x 47 / 119.4 x 119.4 cm

Susan Dobson Viewfinder

Thank you to Amish Morrell for his thoughtful essay on Susan Dobson’s photography Amish Morrell is Editor of C Magazine and Director of Programs at C The Visual Art Foundation.

He teaches in the School of Image Arts at Ryerson University and in the Criticism & Curatorial Practice program at OCAD University.

For Susan Dobson’s Curriculum Vitae and to view the complete Viewfinder series please visit www.gibsongallery.com/artists/susan-dobson Susan Dobson’s Viewfinder series of photographs were first exhibited at the Michael Gibson Gallery from June 5-28, 2014

Front Cover: detail of Sanderson Tropical Field Camera Half Plate, circa 1920 Back Cover: detail of Linhof 4x5, circa 1946

Images © Susan Dobson ISBN 978-0-9736461-9-1 Design Michael Gibson Gallery Printed Carter’s Printing Inc., London, ON

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

www.gibsongallery.com