Spring is Almost in the Air

Here’s a spring season photography suggestion: Spend a few hours in Old Town Alexandria and view two exhibits well worth your time and attention.  I had forgotten how much fun Alexandria can be, with lots of great places to eat, fun boutiques and good art galleries.

Tim Hyde, "Elevator, Colon, Nebraska,"

At the Multiple Exposures Gallery, on the third floor of the Torpedo Factory Arts Center, check out their current exhibition “New Members Show,” featuring Soomin Ham, Tim  Hyde and Fred Zafran.  The photographs on view in this three-person show are diverse, but inherently intriguing.  Tim Hyde’s wintery scenes of rural Nebraska are haunting and, at the same time, glowing. 

Multiple Exposures Gallery is a cooperative gallery, with fifteen accomplished photographers as members.  In addition to what is hanging on the walls, the professionally organized bins are an opportunity to view images from all of the members. I applaud the efforts of Multiple Exposures Gallery and encourage you to visit the venue.  The “New Members Show” is on view through March 24.  For hours and other events, visit the website: www.multipleexposuresgallery.com.

Also in Alexandria, a charming exhibit at the ATHENAEUM: 201 Prince Street,

Entitled ‘”PROCESS; PHOTOGRAPHY.”

The concept of this show is to explore a variety of historic and contemporary photographic devices and processes that have been utilized by photographers (specifically local photographers) in the past few decades.  It is a didactic exhibit, with a printed checklist, which contains copious information on the cameras utilized and the processes to produce the images. The range of picture taking devices is impressive: from a 1890s 5x7 field camera with a 1870s brass lens to an iPhone 4. The diversity of printing techniques is also interesting. 

Although this is a small exhibition – 15 photographers and just 20 images – there’s a lot to learn about equipment and techniques.  I would like to have seen at least one or two more images from each of the artists. Admittedly, my favorite is Robert Creamer’s  ‘Iris Throne” – a delicious floral study.  I have to confess ‘the color of purple’ in this photograph is something I could not resist. 

The Athenaeum is hosting an Artists’ Show and Tell on Sunday, April 7, 2:30pm. This is an opportunity to hear from the photographers themselves.  Unfortunately, the regular hours at the Athenaeum are limited to Thursday, Friday & Sunday, from 12 to 4:00pm, and Saturday from 1 to 4pm.  The website is: www.nvfaa.org.

Faking It

The National Gallery of Art (Washington, DC) is hosting a fascinating exhibition, Faking It: Manipulated Photography before Photoshop, on view through May 5^th.  Originating at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, this exhibit is billed as “the first major exhibition devoted to the art of photographic manipulation before the advent of digital imagery.”

Long before there was Photoshop computer software (introduced in 1990), lots of photographers, both professional and amateur, were modifying, or manipulating, their images, almost since the day the medium was invented.  Why did they do it?  There are a myriad of reasons and this quirky exhibition attempts to answer as many as possible. 

In the 19^th century, when there were no color negatives, photographic artists hand tinted portraits to enhance the features of the sitter.  Also in the 19^th century, there were technical limitations for the films and chemicals.  The long exposures necessary to record details of a landscape rendered the sky blank and without atmospheric clouds.  To compensate, separate negatives were made for the sky and sandwiched with the landscape negative.  As I will explain later, this “cloud thing” continued long into the mid twentieth century.  Sometimes, the image manipulation was for political reasons or in an attempt to alter history.  Other times, the photographers were playing around with weird, often macabre, scenes. “Decapitated Man with Head on Platter,” circa 1865 and “Thirteen Soldiers Holding Severed Heads,” 1910 are two such examples.

Many of the photographers featured in “Faking It” are well known to all photography fans: Gustave Le Gray, Carleton Watkins, Weegee, Richard Avedon, Duane Michals, Jerry Uelsmann, to name just a few, and their stylistic approach is no great surprise.  One of the riches of this show is the abundance of unknown photographers or ones with whom I was not familiar.  I probably should have known about Wanda Wulz, but I didn’t.  Her charming 1932 portrait, “Io + Gatto (Cat + I),” is a collage of her face and her cat’s.  Hard to know who was prettier - the sitter or the feline?

Viewing actual photographs rather than looking at book illustrations is always a feast for the eyes.  Such is the case with the gorgeous Edward Steichen image, “The Pond, Moonrise,” 1904 on loan from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Alfred Stieglitz Collection 1933.  Only three examples of “The Pond, Moonlight” are known to exist, one of which sold at Sotheby’s in February 2006 for $2,928,000, a record for the most expensive photograph ever sold at an auction at that time.  How fortunate we are to have an opportunity to stand in front of a Steichen masterpiece, absorbing the beauty of this classic pictorial work of art. It is a stunning example of photographic enhancement, not manipulation or fakery. 

The early 20^th century pictorial photographers were dedicated to making photographs beautiful pictures and any means to that goal was fair game.  Soft focus romanticism ruled the day and they were willing to take all kinds of artistic license to create ethereal images.

It was the “pictorial” tradition and aesthetic to which A. Aubrey Bodine [1906-1970] joined when he started taking photographs in the mid 1920, an approach he rarely deviated from during his five decades of image making.  As most of you know, I have had the privilege of representing the Bodine photographic estate for many years.  My monograph, A. Aubrey Bodine, Baltimore Pictorialist, was published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 1985.  Research for the book led me to numerous pictorial journals, which regularly featured articles and instructions of the benefits of adding clouds to a photograph.  In 1935, one practitioner stated, “Success in picture making is largely dependent upon knowledge and resource in the matter of skies.  The composition of a picture can be completely changed by the introduction of a well-defined cloud.”  I also found copious notes in Bodine’s own files about the use of separate cloud negatives to embellish a photograph. 

For me, “Faking It” implies deception.  That was not at all the intention of A. Aubrey Bodine and his fellow pictorial photographers.  He simply did everything in his power to conjure up some dark room magic and create, what he considered, a better picture.  He made no apologies for inserting the same cloud formation into “October Field, Baltimore County, Maryland,” as well as “Springtime, Nova Scotia,” or dozen of other landscapes.  Maybe he thought no one was paying attention.

October Field: Baltimore County

Springtime: Nova Scotia