Sightlines 2021 by viscrit

SIGHTLINES 2021

Table of Contents

Sightlines is produced by the Graduate Program in Visual & Critical Studies at California College of the Arts.

Introduction

I. Photography’s Histories and Intimacies MADELINE ROSE CARTER

Visual & Critical Studies (VCS) creates an interdisciplinary and culturally diverse framework within which to bring historical, social, and political analysis, as well as formal analysis, to bear on the interpretation of the visual world. VCS trains students to write professionally about the visual arts and visual culture. Students complete coursework followed by the production of a thesis project, leading to the Master of Arts degree. For more information on the Graduate Program in Visual and Critical Studies at CCA, please contact us: Graduate Program in Visual & Critical Studies, California College of the Arts 1111 Eighth Street San Francisco, CA 94107-2247 USA 415.551.9251 Jacqueline Francis, VCS Program Chair, jfrancis@cca.edu ShawnJ West, Senior Manager of Academic Programs in the Division of Humanities & Sciences, and Administrator of VCS Dual Degree Options, shawnj@cca.edu

Somewhere Between Distance and Intimacy: Mimesis, Memory, and Haptic Translation in the Work of Vija Celmins REBECCA MAE SEXTON

Entangled Ecologies: An Expansion in the Practice of Family Photography

II. The Critique of Medium REBECCA CHACON

Frida Kahlo’s Boots: A Person-First Analysis of Artists with Disabilities HANNAH WAITERS

Fire Under Glass: Black Freedom in Edgar Arceneaux’s Orpheum Returns—Fire’s Creation KARL DAUM

False Images, Half-Truths: 9/11 Conspiracy Memes and the Aestheticization of Politics

Design by MacFadden & Thorpe Typeset in Degular by James Edmondson, CCA BFA 2013

III. Subjectivities in Conceptual Art and Family Photos

https://portal.cca.edu/learning/academic-programs/visual-critical-studies-ma/ http://viscrit.cca.edu/

SAM SOON

Tell Me Who You Are: Imperfections in Waste Not & My Grandmother’s Album DANIEL THOMAS

90 104 111

Chemsex: Diaspora, Transition, Monstrosity, and Post-Nature in Rosha Yaghmai’s Miraclegrow Bios Acknowledgements

Table of Contents

Sightlines is produced by the Graduate Program in Visual & Critical Studies at California College of the Arts.

Introduction

I. Photography’s Histories and Intimacies MADELINE ROSE CARTER

Somewhere Between Distance and Intimacy: Mimesis, Memory, and Haptic Translation in the Work of Vija Celmins REBECCA MAE SEXTON

Entangled Ecologies: An Expansion in the Practice of Family Photography

II. The Critique of Medium REBECCA CHACON

Frida Kahlo’s Boots: A Person-First Analysis of Artists with Disabilities HANNAH WAITERS

Fire Under Glass: Black Freedom in Edgar Arceneaux’s Orpheum Returns—Fire’s Creation KARL DAUM

False Images, Half-Truths: 9/11 Conspiracy Memes and the Aestheticization of Politics

Design by MacFadden & Thorpe Typeset in Degular by James Edmondson, CCA BFA 2013

III. Subjectivities in Conceptual Art and Family Photos

https://portal.cca.edu/learning/academic-programs/visual-critical-studies-ma/ http://viscrit.cca.edu/

SAM SOON

Tell Me Who You Are: Imperfections in Waste Not & My Grandmother’s Album DANIEL THOMAS

90 104 111

Chemsex: Diaspora, Transition, Monstrosity, and Post-Nature in Rosha Yaghmai’s Miraclegrow Bios Acknowledgements

Sightlines 2021

Introduction

Inspired by the long-held customs of Native nations and communities, I begin this essay with a grateful acknowledgment of the original inhabitants of the land on which Sightlines 2021 has been published. California College of the Arts (CCA) campuses are located in Huichin and Yelamu, also known as Oakland and San Francisco, respectively—cities on the unceded territories of Chochenyo and Ramaytush Ohlone peoples who have lived upon this land since time immemorial. We recognize the historic discrimination and violence inflicted upon Indigenous peoples in California and the Americas, including their forced removal from ancestral lands and the deliberate and systematic destruction of their communities and culture. CCA honors Indigenous peoples—past, present, and future—here and around the world, and we wish to pay respect to local elders. The Class of 2021 has earned their Master of Arts degrees in Visual & Critical Studies (VCS) during an especially tumultuous period of human history, captured in visual modes. We have experienced the spread of a deadly virus across the globe, its staggering and heartbreaking wages, and the efforts to survive them by advancing sound public health measures and policies. We have witnessed state-sanctioned, documented killings in North America, Europe, and Asia against Black and Indigenous peoples and against immigrants seeking amnesty and safe haven. In the United States and Canada, anti-Asian harassment and deadly attacks, fueled by xenophobia, racism, and misogyny, are on the rise. In January, the world watched a televised insurrection at the US Capitol. Halfway through 2021, the number of mass shootings in the US is 270. We mourn those whose lives have been lost as the result of anti-Blackness, anti-Asian hatred, misogyny, mob action, and interpersonal violence. We condemn power put to such use. In our intersecting communities, which include resilient survivors of aggression, we stand in solidarity with one another. At this time, when systemic lapses are evident and historical inequities have been laid bare, research, writing, and critical thinking are essential contributions, produced anywhere that people gather to develop and share them. The opportunities to do so in the Bay Area are fewer as Mills College plans

Sightlines 2021

Introduction

Sightlines 2021

to close in 2023, Notre Dame de Namur University has reduced its curricular offerings, and the reorganization of the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI), started in 2020, continues. Changes in the landscape of higher education are sobering, and they are far from over. In the face of these challenges, the VCS Class of 2021 persevered. As it was impossible to hold meetings and seminars on campus, these students met with instructors and each other online during the long academic year of 2020–2021. They ably collaborated on assignments with peers who they had not seen in many months, or in some cases, had never met. (Four members of the cohort transferred from SFAI last spring at the start of shelter-in-place restrictions.) VCS faculty and staff recognize the persistent efforts and ethical labor of this hardy and determined group. The Graduate Program in Visual and Critical Studies VCS students are cultural producers who “make” writing. The award-winning VCS faculty guide them. We illuminate paths of interdisciplinary inquiry, and then get out of the way so that students can dive into the histories of visual culture and identify intellectual allies whose scholarship will aid their analyses. VCS students demonstrate their progress in seminar papers, oral presentations, and short-form articles. The VCS Master of Arts is a two-year commitment. For students who are interested in earning a second terminal master’s degree in Creative Writing, Fine Arts, or Curatorial Practice at CCA, there is the option to pursue their ambition over three years. For both the MA and the Dual Degree students, the preparation of a Sightlines essay is one of the culminating activities of the VCS program: this writing is drawn from the student’s eight-thousand-word Master of Arts thesis. Students also deliver formal talks about their theses in the VCS Annual Spring Symposium. After this preparation, graduating students take jobs in the cultural sector as arts administrators, critics, curators, editors, educators, journalists, and working artists with research-driven practices. Some VCS alumni continue with graduate study, earning doctoral degrees in Visual Studies, Performance Studies, Cultural Studies, Comparative Literature, Art History, Anthropology, and other humanities disciplines at institutions in the US and elsewhere. The diversity of their routes is a solid measure of their training and their passion.

Introduction

The Essays in Sightlines 2021 These essays of approximately 2,500 words each offer an aspect of the MA thesis—either a single chapter’s argument or a summarization of an entire thesis’s claims. Sightlines essays are meant to appeal to the curious reader who may not have the opportunity to read the longer thesis document. Sightlines writers also might circulate their essays as writing samples when they are sharing their research to journal and magazine editors who might publish it, scholarly conference organizers who may invite them to present it, fellowship and residency administrators who fund and otherwise support humanities projects, and admissions committees assessing their applications required for entry into PhD programs. The Sightines 2021 essays are presented in three groupings, organized by themes. Photography’s Histories and Intimacies Today, the import of photography—a creative technology developed long after much older arts and crafts practices—could hardly be overstated. This section’s essayists interrogate the role of photos in the construction of narratives and memories, accounts which must stand up to scrutiny over time. Madeline Rose Carter explains key works in Vija Celmins’s art-making practice: finely detailed paintings based on World War II photographs and realistic sculpture that faithfully captures the physicality of stones and other natural objects which she collects. Carter deems Celmins’s objects material translations which evidence an imbricated processes of cognition and haptic perception. While some might claim that Celmins’s singular goal is mimeticism, Carter’s research makes it clear that the artist seeks to show her hand, in particular, the time she spends contemplating her sources as a period of haunting. Twentieth-century photography of the Pacific Northwest landscape lies at the heart of Rebecca Mae Sexton’s concerns. Photographers documented settler colonial inroads in the region and the establishment of extractive economies such as the logging and railroad industries; families also recorded their homesteading activities and colonization of cleared lands. Sexton asserts that the human ecologies, laid out in published documents and family archives, are intertwined with nature’s ecology in a symbiotic network. Her essay—a memoir engaging place and revealed secrets about kin—connects trauma and violence visited upon the environment and on its denizens.

Sightlines 2021

Introduction

Sightlines 2021

The Critique of Medium In their essays, Karl Daum, Rebecca Chacon, and Hannah Waiters closely examine the cultural interventions of visual phenomena—the meme, the personal artifact, and conceptual art, respectively—unpacking their strategic challenges and reproaches to concentrations of power. Creators of memes appropriate existing images and texts which they post on the Internet, where millions of viewers engage them. Daum’s focus is the post-9/11 conspiracy meme: hieroglyphic-like manipulations of actual video and photography whose popularity reveals distrust of government, institutions, and widely distributed information and visual documents. Daum concludes that the response to these memes must be the proposition, namely, a public, future-facing alternative to fictions created out of fears of the past. Chacon discusses a recent discovery in artist Frida Kahlo’s home—a pair of custom-made boots—and considers the footwear through the lens of feminist disability studies and theories. Noting that Kahlo’s biographers, art historians, and curators writing about her paintings have read her oeuvre as an outcome of her maladies, Chacon situates the boots in a social model of disability. In this framework, disability is not a defect that the individual must fix. Instead, the obstacles of the built environment are addressed and equal access and social justice are sought. The subject of Waiters’s monograph is Orpheum Returns—Fire’s Creation (2011), an installation by African-American artist Edgar Arceneaux. Waiters reveals Arceneaux’s sources and inspirations for the project, from the Greek mythological prophet and popular science writing about combustion, to critique of the art industry and its exclusionary operations. Waiters argues that the presentation of a fire-transformed and sugar-encrusted book in a vitrine is a metaphor for environmental disasters in African-American communities— historical and contemporary. Subjectivities in Conceptual Art and Family Photos This section’s essays explore artistic projects—public and private—grounded in questions about the maker’s sense of self and connections to both family and diasporic experiences. Daniel Thomas carefully describes Rosha Yaghmai’s site-specific work Miraclegrow, exhibited at CCA’s Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in 2019. Thomas recounts the strangeness of a tiled space that featured a plugged-in

Introduction

bug zapper, a bank of dark wooden panels, and a cast sculpture meant to be an outsized representation of a single strand of curling hair. Thomas interprets the installation’s piped-in audio—the American sitcom Three’s Company’s theme song and a recording of the artist’s brother singing an Iranian pop song of the 1970s—as part of the California-born Yaghmai’s effort to communicate the complexity of her bicultural heritage. Sam Soon puts their late grandmother’s photo album in conversation with Waste Not (2005), a collaboration between artist Song Dong and his mother Zhao Xiangyuan. The former is a small, hand-held object that might seem quite different from the latter, a vast assemblage of aesthetically arranged household items. Yet Soon convincingly draws out the similarities around how they receive them, namely, as lovingly conceived archives of long, meaningful, and unidealized relationships. VCS is proud to publish this collection of original writing, authored by the Class of 2021. Sightlines proffers the writers’ skills and knowledge, and our program’s values as well. Please share it with other readers who are curious about Visual Studies scholarship and the ways that it is central to our understanding of and reckoning with our rapidly transforming world. Jacqueline Francis, Chair Graduate Program in Visual & Critical Studies

Sightlines 2021

Introduction

I. PHOTOGRAPHY’S HISTORIES AND INTIMACIES

Sightlines 2021

Madeline Rose Carter

Somewhere Between Distance and Intimacy: Mimesis, Memory, and Haptic Translation in the Work of Vija Celmins MADELINE ROSE CARTER

On a white table, shielded by a glass vitrine, twenty-two small stones rest peacefully. The sealed tableaux signal their peculiar importance, hailing museum viewers to proceed in concentrated investigation. Dodging reflections made by the glass, viewers struggle to ascertain the contents within the translucent barrier that teases the desire to touch. Smudgy traces from fingery eyes affirm this tactile desire, because to touch is to know something beyond sight, and the viewer is made to ask which of the rocks are real, and which are the mimetic copies. Like a geological glitch, they are doubled, each stone has an identical pair. Half are sculpted by time, erosion, weather, and a millennia of geological happenings. The other half are fashioned by Latvian-American artist, Vija Celmins. Entitled To Fix the Image in Memory (1977–1982, fig. 1), the word “image” is significant. It denotes the slippage between reality and image that her oeuvre explores. This work, as well as Celmins’s earlier World War II series of paintings (fig. 3–5), demonstrates how haptic criticality allows for a holistic, even spiritual, relationship with making that transforms the public object into a personal embodied memory. Beginning in 1970s California, Celmins’s work echoes back to a war-torn childhood in Latvia, traceable through World War II photographs and collected desert stones. Cradled in liminality and faintly visible, I view Celmins’s mimetic practice as a subversive model, a materialized analogy for the liminality between perceiving and feeling that can aid us in connecting more deeply with images as embodied memory. Both To Fix an Image in Memory and the World War II series employ a haptic approach in their intermedial translation to connect the seemingly public anonymity of the images and objects into the realm of the persona. Hapticity refers to the interlacing of the cognitive and the physical, emphasizing touch and sensuousness as inseparable from visuality. Celmins’s material translation produces an affect distinct from the original images and objects, located in the haptic quality of the painting itself.

Sightlines 2021

Madeline Rose Carter

Somewhere Between Distance and Intimacy: Mimesis, Memory, and Haptic Translation in the Work of Vija Celmins MADELINE ROSE CARTER

Sightlines 2021

Madeline Rose Carter

Figure 1. Vija Celmins, To Fix the Image in Memory I-XI, 1977–82, stones and painted bronze, dimensions variable. Photo by SFMOMA.

My use of the term translation is indebted to Walter Benjamin, who writes in the essay The Task of the Translator, “translation is a mode.” Translation is a medium in itself, through which we come into contact not only with a new object entirely but a new relationship to the original.1 Benjamin’s concern is with language in its most straightforward definition and claims that the task of the translator is to reach a totality of language—one that is supplemental and dynamic, creating a perfect whole that encompasses the entire spectrum of meaning. Bringing forth the auratic presentness of both objects, the photograph and the painting or the geological specimen and the art object, Celmins enhances their meaning by allowing them to speak together. The aura, or haecceity (a thing being uniquely itself), of the original object is not threatened by the mimetic copy, nor is the art object made invalid by the actual stones or clippings. Instead, their unique existences and particular ontological qualities are enhanced by the other. Celmins’s own story is one of diasporic dimensions, as visualized in the journey from childhood images of a war torn Europe, to the otherworldly timelessness of the California desert. Her practice reflects this transience, a 1

Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” in Selected Writings, Volume 1, 1913–1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996), 253–63.

Figure 2. Vija Celmins, To Fix the Image in Memory I-XI (detail), 1977–82, stone and painted bronze. Photo by SFMOMA.

translation of objects and images that are likewise distant, unrooted things, objects that speak to the larger context of being and becoming. Although seemingly disparate, To Fix and the World War II series mirror one another in both their methods and affect, and when read in tandem, similarly make visible themes of time and memory as interpreted haptically by the body. Channeled through Celmins’s hands, both series employ a pseudo-therapeutic material meditation. This pious mimesis undoes the a priori knowledge of the referent image/object by becoming it so thoroughly that we are provoked to question the inherent nature of the referent itself. The work blurs the categorical and hierarchical divisions between all things, in which both the knowability of an ocean, for example, is contingent on the creation of the painting, and vice versa. The event, the geological object, the natural world, the photograph, and of course, the painting are all leveled in Celmins’s work, creating a sacred dimension where every line is a little prayer, an inhale and exhale, driven by the pure contemplative process of making. In To Fix the Image in Memory, the title guides the viewer to read the objects like an image, encouraging a photographic gaze. Long before the advent of 3D

Sightlines 2021

Madeline Rose Carter

Figure 1. Vija Celmins, To Fix the Image in Memory I-XI, 1977–82, stones and painted bronze, dimensions variable. Photo by SFMOMA.

Figure 2. Vija Celmins, To Fix the Image in Memory I-XI (detail), 1977–82, stone and painted bronze. Photo by SFMOMA.

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printing, Celmins used her body like a sculptural scanner, faithfully recreating each stone with devotional accuracy. Decades earlier, Celmins honed a similar mimetic practice, archiving and collecting images from World War II history books. She explained in a 1991 interview with Chuck Close that she had first decided to paint these photographs out of loneliness and a longing for her family. She recalls, “I had been going through bookstores finding war books and tearing out little clippings of airplanes, bombed out places—nostalgic images.” Like the stones exhumed from a similar anonymity, these clippings are quickly translated from mere things to be flipped through or torn out to specific “nostalgic images.”2 They are rescued from the ephemeral nature of discarded public things, internalized and then externalized as objects of personal, somatic memory.

Upon the Soviet occupation of Latvia in the 1940s, Celmins and her family were relocated to Germany, where they endured the duration of the war until their final emigration to the United States in 1948.3 The effects of this apocalyptic environment in Celmins’s formative years surface in her early post-graduate work that feature paintings and drawings latent with war-time imagery. Deadpan titles such as German Plane (fig. 4) and Suspended Plane (fig. 5) accompany these renderings, avoiding pointing to the obvious Nazi insignias that blemish the sides of the machinery. In reference to T.V. (fig. 3), a large grayscale still life depicting a television image of plummeting WWII planes, Celmins speaks of a sense of nostalgia that inspired the return to the images of her childhood. As an image, the photographic reference for the falling aircrafts embodies liminality quite literally through its decisive pause in a moment of action. However, through Celmins’s framing of the image within the grisaille quietude of the television screen in T.V., the planes that signal rapid imminent violence are still, illustrating how these kinds of images may be temporally abstracted from the horror of the event, but haunt all the same. Through Celmins’s careful rendering, delicate brushstrokes build and coalesce into recognition and the viewer must reckon with the image not merely as a flash on a screen or an image to be skimmed past, but as a temporal object made by a human hand. In an interview with the Tate Modern, she continues this line of thought, stating, “Through the making you make a million decisions that give the work a kind of personal identity that develops over painting it many times and gives it a certain kind of presence.”4 Celmins’s tactile meditation not only imbues the image with slowness, but also the human essence of making as a central character in this work, fostering a connection to the memory without creating a spectacular image. Each decision marks a moment in time that connects the eye, the mind, and the body, lending the photograph a permanence and futurity. Once discarded, the image is now charged with life and an opportunity to be contemplated by new audiences. Celmins’s “million decisions” lend an accuracy to her rendering that can be interpreted as mechanical, like data transmitted through some sort of bodily computation. Materialized memory, now imbued with a new temporality of the process of making, is eclipsed by twenty-first century technical associations with mimetic accuracy. However, upon closer viewing, her humanity becomes increasingly undeniable. Celmins brings forth trauma while simultaneously

Figure 3. Vija Celmins, T.V., 1964, oil on canvas, 261/4 x 36 inches. Photo by SFMOMA.

Vija Celmins, “Interview with Chuck Close,” in Vija Celmins, ed. Lane Relyea (New York: Phaidon, 2004), 126.

3 4

Vija Celmins, “Vija Celmins Biography – Vija Celmins On Artnet,” Artnet, 2021, http://www.artnet.com/artists/vija-celmins/biography. Vija Celmins, “TateShots: ARTIST ROOMS, Vija Celmins,” April 4, 2014, Vimeo video, 3:14, posted by The Tate Museum, https://vimeo.com/90963520.

Sightlines 2021

Madeline Rose Carter

Figure 3. Vija Celmins, T.V., 1964, oil on canvas, 261/4 x 36 inches. Photo by SFMOMA.

Vija Celmins, “Interview with Chuck Close,” in Vija Celmins, ed. Lane Relyea (New York: Phaidon, 2004), 126.

3 4

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acknowledging our innate inaccessibility to the event, condensing and confining it within the boundaries of the index of painting. Renderings of war time news clippings, burning vehicles, and artillery planes are transposed into small and manageable paintings, fragments of memories shrouded in time and touch. The focus shifts from the what to the how. Eyes fidget and adjust, tweaking focus with lids that contract and narrow. In the awareness of the physiological limitation of seeing, the eyes land on paint, on fine moments of smoothed texture that undulates, blurring, bulging, and unfolding into a landscape of hapticity. You can’t see the forest for the trees, and vice versa. As a painting of a photograph, T.V. elicits two types of looking. The photographic quality encourages a gaze that is only accessible via a machine, i.e. a camera. It demands that the viewer take in the image as a whole, a snapshot of a time and place, always in the past. As a painting, T.V. simultaneously demands a haptic look, in which the texture of the brushwork brings the viewer into the folds of the painting that signify a maker, a human creation. Shifting from photographic visuality, a cerebral and cognitive interpretation of the image as sign/ signifier, to textural hapticity, Celmins personalizes the photographs, translating her cerebral memory into a tangible, embodied memory. Mark by mark, images casually flipped through in the context of a magazine or textbook are rebuilt into a new architecture. Time is not frozen as it is in the context of the photograph, but amorphous, elastic and undulating. Each mark is a second on the clock, the whole painting becoming a measure of immeasurable time. In the aforementioned interview, Close insinuates a transcendent quality in her work, hinting towards a belief in the presence of magic inherent in art-making, all to Celmins’s chagrin.5 Aligned with Close, I, too, recognize the spiritual ethereal dimension in the work. Celmins transforms these images that are otherwise familiar or common into speaking objects. They cause me to stop in my tracks and look with concentrated devotion. I am transfixed by their phenomenological presence, at first in awe of the accuracy and the skill of her work, and then lost in the undulations of gray marks, the light and dark that bring you deep into the crevices of the painting, only to be once again pushed out to an equally haptic surface of minute sculptural layering of pigment or graphite on a textile. In Celmin's work, images become vessels of meditative time in the liminal space between sight and touch.

5 6

Vija Celmins, “Interview with Chuck Close,” in Vija Celmins, ed. Lane Relyea (New York: Phaidon, 2004), 126. Laura U. Marks, “Connective Materialism,” in Touch (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), xi.

In her book Touch, Laura U. Marks describes this haptic approach to reading images, I search the image for a trace of the originary, physical event. The image is connective tissue; it’s that fold in the universal strudel. [...] By staying close to the surface of an event, I hope to trace a connection between the event’s material history, the event itself, me, and you.6 Surface, like the smooth reflective gloss of a photograph or the ribbed waves of a stroke of paint on the face of a canvas, compels movement in the body. The optical starting point unfolds into haptic experience. For example, a glossy photograph may cause a viewer to sway side to side, seeking clarity as reflections obfuscate parts of the image. In contrast, the rippled texture of the brushstroke draws the body closer to assess the making of the image. The texture of the object impacts the viewer physically, united in a moment of presentness. As Celmins states, “I thought of it as putting the images that I found in books and magazines back in the real world—in real time. Because when you look at the work you confront the here and now. It’s right there.”7 Like a deep, meditative inhale, the presence that the work commands flattens the historic specificity of the source image; it becomes the “connective tissue” that weaves the human experience together. Celmins works through the elliptical relationship of photography and painting through liminality. But what of her sculptural work? Mimesis generates difference— the closer the image/object succeeds in visually depicting its subject, the more evident the disparities between reality and the representation appear to be. It also generates differences between what the mind knows, what the eye sees, and what the body feels. Or as Celmins states, “The photo is an alternative subject, another layer that creates distance. And distance creates an opportunity to view the work more slowly and to explore your relationship to it.”8 Celmins treats the collected stones in To Fix the Image in Memory similarly, inhabiting the uncanny valley of distance by pressing herself against the grain of the object. Instead of seeing the objects as merely archived collections or traces of another place in the world, the viewer is made aware of the objects materiality and the “here and now” of making. The work consists of the precise recreation 7 8

Celmins and Close, Vija Celmins interviewed by Chuck Close, 1–64. Celmins and Close, Vija Celmins interviewed by Chuck Close, 1–64.

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5 6

Celmins and Close, Vija Celmins interviewed by Chuck Close, 1–64. Celmins and Close, Vija Celmins interviewed by Chuck Close, 1–64.

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Madeline Rose Carter

Figure 4. Vija Celmins, German Plane, 1966, oil on canvas, 26 x 16 inches. Photo by SFMOMA.

Figure 5. Vija Celmins, Suspended Plane, 1966, oil on canvas, 18 x 28 inches. Photo by SFMOMA.

of several found river stones, cast in bronze and painted in scrupulous accuracy. Nearly indistinguishable from one another, the natural stones and the constructed mimetic objects are displayed side by side. Sometimes the clones sit in pairs, sometimes they are arranged randomly, the doubling effect only coming into prominence upon closer investigation. Painted, not paintings, they refute the ontological state of becoming that the gerund “painting” usually suggests. These mimetic objects are both fixed by this action and activated by the temporality suggested by their meticulously slow sculptural process. The actual river stones, shaped by geological forces, sculpted by time and kinetics (erosion), are analogous to Celmins’s construction of the copy—arising out of hours of meticulously tactile work and close looking. By collecting the organic stones and removing them from their context, Celmins disrupts their prescribed fate of eventual total disintegration, halting their geological cycle. Much like a photograph, they become frozen in one version of time. While their mimetic copies might imply a sort of photographic reproducibility, they starkly resist the mechanical. Instead of “fixing the images in memory,” these sculptures fix her memories into objects. To sculpt the memory

with faithful mimesis removes illusion entirely. It is not a three-dimensional object translated into a two-dimensional surface rendering, rather it is an après of nature. The mimetic act transforms these rocks into “originals,” perfect forms which Celmins strives to replicate with a solemn devotion reminiscent of spiritual piety. This sounds strikingly similar to Marks’s definition of haptic criticism: Haptic criticism is mimetic: it presses up to the object and takes its shape. Mimesis is a form of representation based on getting close enough to the other thing to become it. Again, the point is not to utterly replace symbolization, a form of representation that requires distance, with mimesis. Rather it is to maintain a robust flow between sensuous closeness and symbolic distance.9 Celmins’s hands as they craft and speckle the bronze stones with illusionary mastery help to create this very flow. Again, mimesis generates 9

Marks, “Connective Materialism,” xiii.

Sightlines 2021

Madeline Rose Carter

Figure 4. Vija Celmins, German Plane, 1966, oil on canvas, 26 x 16 inches. Photo by SFMOMA.

Figure 5. Vija Celmins, Suspended Plane, 1966, oil on canvas, 18 x 28 inches. Photo by SFMOMA.

Marks, “Connective Materialism,” xiii.

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difference—some aspects of the original stone cannot be fully replicated— the mica sparkle, for example, remains irreproducible in Celmins’s rendering and the viewer does eventually become aware of the copy. This a-ha moment does not merely point to the inability for any translation to fully embody the whole essence of the original, but also points to the space between the alien stones, a space that cannot be visualized, but is felt all the same. Whether it’s the feeling of awe at human ingenuity, or shame at human hubris, the distance created between the geological stone and the crafted stone allows for the sacred space of reflective meditative contemplation, a space increasingly threatened by the rise of the attention economy. Like the images of war that come to symbolize her childhood memories, the photorealistic copy reminds us of the mutability of memory. Time, age, and contexts erode, they shape and reshape history and render the ability to “fix” anything in permanence an impossible task. If the intimate mimetic gesture reveals to us that it fails, then we become aware of the “distance.” Distance here is embodied by the disparateness of each stone’s creation story, the span between human time and ineffable geologic time. In both To Fix and the WWII series, Celmins performs both collector and translator. The act of collecting the photographs or stones, flipping or rolling them around in her hands, and her specific selection feels like an affirmation. She transforms them into speaking objects, diminutive special morsels of the traces of something that is historically distant or phenomenologically incommunicable. Each stone is an obscure talisman, each photo a materialized memory to be investigated through the act of haptic material translation. In remarking on the nuanced gesture of Celmins’s retranslation of these found documentary photographs, scholar Jason Hill states, “These photographs report, and they report best when they offer transparency, immediacy, instantaneity […]. They are cheap and ubiquitous windows […]. They thus render their own materiality invisible; too overburdened with reference, they are the hardest photographs to see.”10 Making visible the photograph as a physical object that circulates and lodges itself deep into the psyche of those that view it brings forth the affectual impact of images otherwise lost in their original context. News photographs such as these work to erase their own making, however shocking they are in their content, so that their appearance in our world seems of the 10

Jason Hill, “Vija Celmins: Television and Disaster, 1964–1966,” X-TRA 14, no. 2 (Winter 2011), https://www.x-traonline.org/article/vija-celmins-television-anddisaster-1964-1966.

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most neutral and informational nature. Even the most atrocious photograph is neutralized when presented in the context of informational public totems. Celmins’s work does not further dramatize or spectacularize these images in order to elicit an emotive response; instead, she succeeds in rendering a contemplative relationship to the images. Haunting takes time, and Celmins makes this time visible through her own exhaustive and slow process. Like the languid floating to the surface of a deeply embedded childhood memory, the materialization of these images through painting brings history back into the physical world, the here and now.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Benjamin, Walter. “The Task of the Translator.” In Selected Writings Volume 1 1913–1926, edited by Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings, 253–63. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996. Celmins Vija. “Vija Celmins BiographyVija Celmins On Artnet.” Artnet, 2021. http:/artnet.com/artists/vija-celmins/ biography. ---. “TateShots: ARTIST ROOMS, Vija Celmins.” Vimeo video, 3:14. Posted by The Tate Museum, Apr. 4, 2014. --- and Chuck Close. “Chuck Close in Conversation with Vija Celmins About Her Dense Yet Infinite Drawings, 1991. Artspace, April 19, 2017. https://www.artspace.com/magazine/

interviews_features/book_report/ chuck-close-in-conversation-with-vija celmins-about-her-dense-yet-infinitedrawings-54732. --- and Chuck Close. “Interview with Chuck Close.” In Vija Celmins, ed. Lane Relyea, 118-31. New York: Phaidon, 2004. Hill, Jason. “Vija Celmins: Television and Disaster, 1964–1966.” X-TRA 14, no. 2 (Winter 2011). https://www.x-traonline.org/article/vija-celmins-television-and-disaster-1964-1966. Marks, Laura U. Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002.

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Jason Hill, “Vija Celmins: Television and Disaster, 1964–1966,” X-TRA 14, no. 2 (Winter 2011), https://www.x-traonline.org/article/vija-celmins-television-anddisaster-1964-1966.

Madeline Rose Carter

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Rebecca Mae Sexton

Entangled Ecologies: An Expansion in the Practice of Family Photography REBECCA MAE SEXTON

All of my family stories involve the landscape— particularly that of the Pacific Northwest forests where they settled in the 1880s. I first heard these stories while going through inherited photographs. The significance of family photographs extends beyond the image. It circulates in broader relational contexts and practices of remembering and of kin that I call familial ecology. Public archives, such as the documentation of the logging industry and conventional histories, reference the landscape as well. Within these public archives, such as the work of Clark, Darius, and Tabitha May Kinsey, there lies the trace of a traumatic struggle of human actors against towering trees and underground networks of flora and fauna (fig. 1). These connections have been flattened out in the prevailing understanding of the Pacific Northwest. Neither the stories of my family, nor the public archive, address each other. Alone, each lacks the terms to incorporate landscape as vital subject matter. In attempting to address the occurrences in this place since its colonization, I graft divergent archival creations onto one another and recover familial ecologies. Recognizing that what is public was always once private, I start with the family photographic archive. Without the admission of the surrounding ecologies, private family photography perpetuates cherished social myths: nostalgia for ostensibly simpler times and idealization of ancestors. Still, the private archive holds essential evidence of personal trauma and of the violence of settler-colonialism. An expanded practice of family photography, one which entangles the private and public archive, as in my own family album, reveals familial ecologies through a shared inheritance of trauma. My family album lives in musty boxes. These boxes contain all that my dad has left of his parents, Ethel Mae (McCoy) Sexton and Ralph Daniell Sexton. Significantly, this is the only album I have ever seen of their photographs. The dark brown leather cover has become soft, worn, and incredibly flexible with age. It has no closure to secure it. Inside, the pages are made of thick, black paper. An unknown relative assembled the album using cream-colored

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Rebecca Mae Sexton

Entangled Ecologies: An Expansion in the Practice of Family Photography REBECCA MAE SEXTON

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Rebecca Mae Sexton

adhesive photo corners. In some places, white hand-written letters label a photograph on the black page. In others, notes in black ink appear directly on the photo’s border or its backside. Its organization is as unclear as its author. As you turn the pages, the album becomes more and more disorganized. I cannot discern if this unravelling is from the organizer or a result of passing through many hands after the death of my grandmother. As I was examining the album, I wondered about their identity, their behavior, their experiences, and, just as importantly, their place in the landscape. Cultural geographer Gillian Rose states that family photographs exceed our understanding of a genre; they are “a particular sort of image with which specific things are done,” and that these photographs must be thought of “as assemblages of both a certain kind of object and a certain kind of practice.”1 It is an active and participatory experience of holding and remembering. Family photographs are meant to be touched, held, passed around, framed, and placed in albums. They are tactile objects as much as they are images.2 They are traces and residues of multiple lives, as well as the intersections of those lives. However, they are treated as unworthy of analysis in academia. They typically matter only within a single family in a private context. According to Rose, family photography focuses on the figures within the frame—asking questions of who. Going through the album with my father reinforced the sharing and participation embedded within the practice of family photography.3 The muddiness around how the album came to be acts as a metaphor for the way that inheritance, especially within familial ecologies, is entangled, knotted, and sometimes hidden. My relationship with my own family album entangles the trauma of the forests with the trauma of my grandmother, the protagonist of the album. My great-grandfather sexually abused my grandmother. He worked for the railroad companies in western Washington. Due to the ties between the railroad and the lumber industry, my great-grandfather violated the land as he violated his own daughter. When this was revealed to me in a conversation with my father, the lingering trauma that permeates my family was named for the first time in my memory, and possibly for the first time since my grandmother spoke it on her deathbed twenty-seven years earlier. Within the framework of family photography, a private archive establishes a connection between the inheritor of the archive and the subjects of the

Figure 1. Darius Kinsey and Tabitha May Kinsey, 114. Felling Cedar Tree 20 Feet from Ground, in Washington [1905], 1905, gelatin silver print, 10 5/8 x 13 5/8 inches. Private Collection of Dave Bohn and Rodolfo Petschek.

Gillian Rose, “How to Look at Family Photographs: Practices, Objects, Subjects, and Places,” in Doing Family Photography: The Domestic, the Public, and the Politics of Sentiment (Abingdon, Oxfordshire, UK: Routledge, 2016), 12. Elizabeth Edwards and Janice Hart, “Introduction: Photographs as Objects,” in Photographs Objects Histories: On the Materiality of Images (London: Routledge, 2010), 14−15. Rose, “How to Look at Family Photographs,” 16.

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photographs within the archive. My family album contains black and white silver-gelatin photographs. Most of them have a warm tone and a glossy surface. All of the photographs are two inches by three inches; a characteristic which makes them easy to hold and see. One photograph in particular caught my attention (fig. 2). On the left, my grandmother, Ethel Mae, sits upon the ground (fig. 3). She looks up and smiles. She wears a button-up sweater and crisply collared blouse tucked into thick pants. Mae’s pin-curled hair rests close to her head and neck. Her body is relaxed, sitting among wildflowers and ferns. She seems comfortable as she smiles (possibly laughs) in the direction of the man. On the right, my grandfather, Ralph, mirrors my grandmother. He stands in a relaxed posture looking down toward her (fig. 4). He wears a short-sleeved white button-down shirt and a tie. His dark wool trousers are held up by suspenders. The style of dress positions them in the 1930s. My grandfather looks just as comfortable standing as my grandmother does sitting. Neither of their bodies seem to be carrying any tension at all. It is as if they have both just exhaled in joy, love, or celebration. They seem oblivious to their surroundings, to the past of this site, to Mae’s own trauma. They are in the present, and the photograph is made present once again, to me, as the viewer. As described within Rose’s scholarship, the practice of family photography deprives the viewers and inheritors of the larger contextual framework within which we live our actual lives. By tending to other important traces in this photograph, specifically evidence of personal trauma and of the violence of settler-colonialism, I hope to expand the frame of these images to entangle the documentation of extractive resource practices. Each time my family sits around the table, the stories come close to granting agency to non-human actors, but the narratives of these myths skirt the implications that our relationship with the land suggests. Our stories attend to the presence of a familial ecology which incorporates the land, fungi, flora, and fauna. They lack the terminology to develop it fully in a historical context. Usually, scholarship addressing this type of violence has focused on public archives and left the private records out of the picture.4 Furthermore, the public record reflects the colonial mindset which has been pervasive in this part of the world; a mindset in which important elements of familial ecology were exploited as raw materials to serve economic stability. A more significant and nuanced story of the Pacific Northwest can only emerge if it is rooted in the effaced evidence within 4

W.J.T. Mitchell, Landscape and Power, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).

Rebecca Mae Sexton

Figure 2. Mae Sexton and Ralph Daniell Sexton, undated, circa 1930−1940, gelatin silver print, 2 1/2 x 3 1/2 inches. Sexton Family Archive, Woodinville, WA.

Figure 3. Detail of Ethel Mae (McCoy) Sexton from undated photograph of Mae Sexton and Ralph Daniell Sexton, circa 1930−1940, gelatin silver print, 2 1/2 x 3 1/2 inches. Sexton Family Archive, Woodinville, WA.

Figure 4. Detail of Ralph Daniell Sexton from undated photographic print of Mae Sexton and Ralph Daniell Sexton, circa 1930−1940, gelatin silver print, 2 1/2 x 3 1/2 inches. Sexton Family Archive, Woodinville, WA.

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W.J.T. Mitchell, Landscape and Power, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).

Rebecca Mae Sexton

Figure 2. Mae Sexton and Ralph Daniell Sexton, undated, circa 1930−1940, gelatin silver print, 2 1/2 x 3 1/2 inches. Sexton Family Archive, Woodinville, WA.

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Figure 5. Darius Kinsey and Tabitha May Kinsey, “Darius Junior at top of the pile, fourth from left,” undated, gelatin silver print, 10 5/8 x 13 5/8 inches. Private Collection of Dave Bohn and Rodolfo Petschek.

Oregon Trail in the mid-1800s. Additionally, around the time of this photograph, immigrants from places such as Ireland, Scotland, and Hungary arrived in the Pacific Northwest eager to create a new life. Their focus was on feeding their families, and the forest was a casualty. Many of these immigrants found jobs within the extractive resource practices already in motion in the region. The lumber industry, for which Washington state is known, was founded in earnest by the Hudson’s Bay Company in the 1820s as the fur trade dwindled. After the construction of Fort Vancouver, white settlers began to systematically eradicate the old-growth forests and cultures.6 These settlers saw the land, and its various natural resources, as consumable objects and raw material. In this region, this economic development took the form of clearcutting.7 Douglas fir, sitka spruce, western hemlock, and western red cedar support and structure the complex ecologies of the Pacific Coast rainforests. All of these trees have endemic ranges from southeastern Alaska along the coast to northern California. These trees have a long history and are inextricably linked. Fossil evidence suggests western red cedar trees have existed in the region for over 30,000 years.8 Dr. Suzanne Simard, an expert in forest ecologies, describes the way that old-growth trees within a forest act as hubs (or mothers) within these immense ecologies.9 The fungi within the soil and the seedling of a tree intertwine and interact, growing symbiotically through this communion. These relationships are referred to as mycorrhizae.10 According to Simard’s research, the seedling shares carbon from photosynthesis while the fungi share water and other nutrients (often in the form of minerals). As the fungi grows underground, it connects each plant and tree linking the entire forest. As more seedlings take root, they join these hidden networks. The mycorrhizae radiate from the elder trees. Those trees send messages through the webs of fungal filaments, which link to all of the trees around them.11 Each individual tree is linked to all the rest in the forest through fungi, not only in space, but also in time. Through this web of support, trees store and communicate generational memories. Additionally, they are able to “recognize and talk with their kin, which shapes future generations.”12 This communicative relationship between various generations of trees creates a familial ecology within forests.

those very private narratives commonly deemed insignificant—because they are rooted in familial ecology. In expanding my line of questioning from a focus on the figures to include more-than-human kin, such as flora and fungi, I call into the frame the presence and inheritance of a larger familial ecology.5 Identifying anything beyond my grandparents proves a difficult task. Public archives, such as those held by museums, universities, and historical societies, are full of evidence of the colonial development of the Pacific Northwest (fig. 5). Thinking through this kind of public archive gets beyond the individual human figures in the frame and back to the broader ecology. However, without the family archive, it has only a tenuous connection to the individual inheritor. My grandparents stand in a long tradition of western settlers. Their presence in the Pacific Northwest is a consequence of the influx of settlers who had begun families and created homesteads after travelling West on the 5 6 7

David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World (New York: Vintage Books, 1997). Carlos A. Schwantes, “Continental Dreams and Fur Empires,” in The Pacific Northwest: An Interpretive History (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), 53−79. Clearcutting is the practice of uniformly removing all trees in a given area. See: Aaron Scott, “The Plan,” September 21, 2020, in Timber Wars, podcast, 38:09, https://www.npr. org/podcasts/906829608/timber-wars. Karel Klinka and David Brisco, “Silvics and Silviculture of Coastal Western Redcedar: A Literature Review,” Forest Sciences Department, University of British Columbia, 2009. https://www.for.gov.bc.ca/hfd/pubs/Docs/Srs/Srs11.pdf. It is important to note that Simard identified these deeply important fungal networks in the same extended forests that my family is from.

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Mycorrhizae (from the Greek) literally means (mýkēs): “fungus“ and (rhiza): “root“. These networks can also be pathways for sending and sharing other necessary chemicals, such as nitrogen and phosphorus, as well as allele chemicals and hormones. Additionally, when trees are stressed (usually due to drought or shade), the mother trees can sense the chemical changes and send them nutrients. See: Suzanne Simard, “The Networked Beauty of Forests,” TED-Ed, April 14, 2014, video, 7:23, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dRSPy3ZwpBk. Suzanne Simard, “Notes from a Forest Scientist,” in The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate—Discoveries from a Secret World (Vancouver, Canada: Greystone Books, 2016), 249.

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Figure 6. Detail of fire pit from undated photographic print of Mae Sexton and Ralph Daniell Sexton, circa 1930−1940, gelatin silver print, 2 1/2 x 3 1/2 inches. Sexton Family Archive, Woodinville, WA.

This familial ecology centers itself on the shared knowledge and memory of the oldest subjects. These grandmother trees carry the knowledge of and, therefore, sustain the forest. The destruction of rich familial ecologies of the Pacific Northwest, which began with the first moment of colonial contact, persists. With this history of endemic ecologies in mind, I return to the photograph of my grandparents to expand my view past the figures photographed. Grandma Mae sits on some border delineating a square or rectangle, distinguishing the broader landscape from its small area (fig. 6). This outline suggests management of the land. The rectangle, upon whose border my grandmother rests, seems to contain less overgrowth. The topsoil looks dry and barren. A circular shape emerges from the ground behind and to the left of my grandmother— what appears to be a fire pit, with the surrounding area mostly cleared of brush to reduce risk of fires. Zooming out from this portioned off ground area, the landscape becomes more “wild.”13 There are layers of wildflowers, ground brush, grasses, and ferns, among many other unidentifiable shapes (fig. 7). These are the types of “pioneer plants” that move into areas following huge environmental changes, such as wildfire or clearcutting.14 I believe that the space where my grandparents stand is the remnants of a clear-cut 13 14

Jonathan Bordo, “Picture and Witness at the Site of Wilderness,” in Landscape and Power, ed. W.J.T. Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 291−315. Peter Wohllenben, “Burnout,” in The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate—Discoveries from a Secret World (Vancouver, Canada: Greystone Books, 2016), 180−185.

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Figure 7. Detail of pioneer plants from undated photographic print of Mae Sexton and Ralph Daniell Sexton, circa 1930−1940, gelatin silver print, 2 1/2 x 3 1/2 inches. Sexton Family Archive, Woodinville, WA. Figure 8. Detail of forest from undated photographic print of Mae Sexton and Ralph Daniell Sexton, circa 1930−1940, gelatin silver print, 2 1/2 x 3 1/2 inches. Sexton Family Archive, Woodinville, WA.

forest. There are large triangular shadows in the far background, behind my grandfather (fig. 8). These seem to be mature trees. The pioneer plants that surround my grandparents stand ready to reclaim this newly opened land for themselves. Together, smiling and blowing in the wind, they are the colonizers of the old-growth forests of the Pacific Northwest. In the photograph, my grandparents are blissfully homesteading. However, this familial ecology also includes Indigenous peoples.15 Through the recognition and naming of Indigenous dispossession within Washington state, the harm and violence of colonialism takes on a more encompassing contextualization. As botanist and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, Robin Wall Kimmerer said about the Pacific Coast forests, “alone is a word without meaning in this forest.”16 Through her personal reflections and observations of the

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natural world within the borders of the so-called United States, Kimmerer illuminates the reciprocal, multivalent networks of more-than-human kin. Before white settlers arrived, immense biodiversity saturated the Pacific Northwest. Indigenous peoples tended to and respected each and every lifeform. However, the arrival of settlers forced the familial ecologies to expand and change because of the belief that these forests were empty and blank spaces. With this idea, settlers set up homesteads with markers, creating boundaries and distinctions of private property. My grandparents’ photograph shows an example of boundaries and demarcations that enclose and partition particular land (and ecologies) for specific use. Fences and barriers, as well as other forms of containment and displacement, such as clear cuts, create hard borders between swaths of land. These barriers are at odds with ecologies, whose distinctions are muddy, slippery, and soft. My family has lived in and around the western face of the Cascade Mountains in Washington state for the past 150 years. We are tied to this land and the flora, fauna, and fungi, as well as the people who share this space with us. Within this relationship with place, the natural world is as much a part of my family as my siblings. The vast and complex symbiotic networks of kin, which are revealed in my family album, can be understood as a familial ecology. As a kinship structure, a familial ecology carries mutual care alongside trauma and violence. An expansion of the practice of family photography to include the public archive reveals hidden familial ecologies. My family’s existence in the coastal rainforests and foothills parallels the various forms of colonization inflicted upon and endured by these deep ecologies. Various forms of harm live on in the actual material of their inheritors and offspring. The consequences of this harm leave traces and residues, like the slime trail of a banana slug—or like a forgotten photograph in a family album—that map out where histories lie latent.

While I do not know where the photograph of my grandparents was taken, I believe they are in Washington state. Currently, there are 29 federally recognized tribes in so-called Washington: Chehalis, Colville, Cowlitz, Hoh, Jamestown S’Klallam, Kalispel, Lower Elwha Klallam, Lummi, Makah, Muckleshoot, Nisqually, Nooksack, Port Gamble S’Klallam, Puyallup, Quileute, Quinault, Samish, Sauk-Suiattle, Shoalwater Bay, Skokomish, Snoqualmie, Spokane, Squaxin Island, Stillaguamish, Suquamish, Swinomish, Tulalip, Upper Skagit, and Yakama. Additionally, there are three tribes that are currently not recognized by the US federal government: Duwamish, Wanapum, and Chinook. See: “Indigenous Tribes of Seattle and Washington,” American Library Association, November 19, 2018, http://www. ala.org/aboutala/indigenous-tribes-seattle-and-washington#:~:text=There%20are%20 29%20federally%20recognized. Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2013), 278.

Rebecca Mae Sexton BIBLIOGRAPHY Abram, David. The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-ThanHuman World. New York: Vintage Books, 1997. Azoulay, Ariella. The Civil Contract of Photography. New York: Zone Books, 2012. Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida. New York: Hill and Wang, 1980. Batchen, Geoffrey. Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999. ———. Each Wild Idea: Writing, Photography, History. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 2002. ———. Forget Me Not: Photography and Remembrance. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2004. ———. “Light and Dark: A Little History of the Negative.” Lecture. Power Institute of Fine Art, University of Sydney, October 9, 2019. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=S1nV08WqhEM. ———. “Repetition and Difference: The Dissemination of Photography.” ZHUANGSHI: Chinese Journal of Design 240 (April 2013): 62-71. https://doi.org/ http://en.izhsh.com.cn/doc/10/185.html. Benjamin, Walter. “The Little History of Photography.” In The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media, edited by Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and

Thomas Y. Levin, 274–98. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008. ———. “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility.” In The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, edited by Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin, 19–55. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008. Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. London: British Broadcasting Corp., 1972. Bohn, Dave, and Rodolfo Petschek. Kinsey, Photographer: A Half Century of Negatives. Vol. 1. The Family Album and Other Early Work. San Francisco: Scrimshaw Press, 1975. ———. Kinsey, Photographer: A Half Century of Negatives. Vol. 2. The Magnificent Years. San Francisco: Scrimshaw Press, 1975. Bordo, Jonathan. “Picture and Witness at the Site of Wilderness.” In Landscape and Power, edited by W.J.T. Mitchell, 291–315. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Boym, Svetlana. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books, 2001. de Waal, Edmund. “About – The Hare with Amber Eyes.” Edmund de Waal, 2010. https://www. edmunddewaal.com/writing/ the-hare-with-amber-eyes/about.

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———. The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance. The Illustrated Edition. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011. ———. “Profile - Resources,” Edmund de Waal, 2020. https://www.edmunddewaal.com/resources/profile. Edwards, Elizabeth, and Janice Hart. “Introduction: Photographs as Objects.” In Photographs Objects Histories: On the Materiality of Images, edited by Elizabeth Edwards and Janice Hart, 1–15. London: Routledge, 2010.

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“Indigenous Tribes of Seattle and Washington.” American Library Association, November 19, 2018. http://www.ala. org/aboutala/indigenous-tribes-seattle-and-washington#:~:text=There%20 are%2029%20federally%20recognized. Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2013.

Gordon, Avery. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and The Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008.

Klinka, Karel and David Brisco. “Silvics and Silviculture of Coastal Western Redcedar: A Literature Review.” Forest Sciences Department, University of British Columbia, 2009. https://www. for.gov.bc.ca/hfd/pubs/Docs/Srs/Srs11. pdf.

Guibert, Hervé. Ghost Image. Translated by Robert Bononno. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014.

Mann, Sally. Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs. New York: Back Bay Books, 2015.

Haraway, Donna J. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016.

Mitchell, W. J. T. “Preface to the Second Edition of Landscape and Power: Space, Place, and Landscape.” In Landscape and Power, edited by W. J. T. Mitchell, vii-xii. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002.

Hirsch, Marianne. Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012. ———. “Postmemory.” POSTMEMORY. NET, 2012. https://www.postmemory. net/2012/01/04/hello-world/. Horenstein, Henry. Black and White Photography: A Basic Manual. Boston: Little Brown, 1983.

———. “Imperial Landscape.” In Landscape and Power, edited by W. J. T. Mitchell, 5–34. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. ———. Introduction. In Landscape and Power, edited by W. J. T. Mitchell, 1–4. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002.

Rose, Gillian. Doing Family Photography: The Domestic, The Public, and The Politics of Sentiment. Abingdon, Oxfordshire, UK: Routledge, 2016.

Snyder, Joel. “Territorial Photography.” In Landscape and Power, edited by W. J. T. Mitchell, 175–202. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002.

Schwantes, Carlos A. The Pacific Northwest: An Interpretive History. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996.

Stewart, Hilary. Cedar: Tree of Life to the Northwest Coast Indians. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003.

Scott, Aaron. “The Plan.” Timber Wars, September 21, 2020. Podcast, 38:09. https://www.npr.org/ podcasts/906829608/timber-wars.

Wamsley, Laurel, and Scott Neuman. “Trump Administration Moves To Allow Logging In Alaska’s Tongass National Forest.” NPR, September 25, 2020. https:// www.npr.org/2020/09/25/916932812/ trump-administration-moves-to-allow-logging-in-alaskas-tongass-national-forest.

Simard, Suzanne. “How Trees Talk to Each Other.” August 13, 2016. TED video, 18:10. https://www.ted.com/talks/ suzanne_simard_how_trees_talk_to_ each_other. ———. “The Networked Beauty of Forests.” April 14, 2014. TED-Ed video, 7:23. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=dRSPy3ZwpBk. ———. “Notes from a Forest Scientist.” In The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate—Discoveries from a Secret World, edited by Peter Wohlleben, 247–50. Vancouver, Canada: Greystone Books, 2016. Smith, Shawn Michelle. At the Edge of Sight: Photography and the Unseen. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013. Solnit, Rebecca. A Field Guide to Getting Lost. New York: Penguin Books, 2005. Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York: Picador, 1977.

Wohlleben, Peter. The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate. Vancouver, Canada: Greystone Books, 2018.