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<\/a>Photo by Simon Blundell<\/p><\/div>\n
Seemingly a bit lost in the 21st century, Joseph Marotta finds a number of things wrong with now; and particularly with here. His photographs explore the concept of time \u2013 the way we experience its passing and how that experience now seems to be accelerating.<\/p>\n
So when he retires in June from the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Utah, Marotta will spend up to half of every year in Europe\u2014for cause: We lack a strong connection to our past, he observes, something he thinks essential to a culture. \u201cI mean, because a building is 300 years old, they don\u2019t knock it down,\u201d though there might be a very contemporary clothing store right next to it. \u00a0And, he says, we\u2019re always in a hurry here, on our cell phones, thinking about what we should be doing next, rarely sitting al fresco with a coffee or glass of wine for an hour to simply watch people walk by, to contemplate \u201cthe wonderful theater of life.\u201d<\/p>\n
He chooses to photograph primarily in black and white and largely in France and Italy, but writes excellent short stories in any caf\u00e9 on a silvery laptop. It\u2019s how he begins most days: coffee, prose, perhaps thinking about what he\u2019s going to discuss in class. \u201cTeaching has to be interesting for\u00a0me<\/em>, as well as the students.\u201d A music aficionado, he listens to jazz, Bach and Dylan with equal avidity (well, perhaps jazz wins out here); reads poetry and serious literature (some in slightly rusty Italian); and makes small tables and tiny boxes from exotic woods \u2013 the boxes to hold the collection of classy fountain pens with which he writes. (He even uses a typewriter–manual, of course.)<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Thousands of students have been fortunate in Marotta as their professor since he arrived in 1978. Soft-spoken with intriguing observations to make about his art and the world, you want to capture every word. (I hope my tape recorder is doing so now.)<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ve always felt that students should know how to do black-and-white photography in the darkroom, they should know how to do color, they should know how to do large format, studio photography, alternative photography, so those are things I planned into the program. Now we have a strong digital emphasis. A lot of students enjoy going into the darkroom and doing black and white, silver prints, so I\u2019m glad we haven\u2019t gotten rid of that. A lot of schools have. Completely gotten rid of their darkrooms and replaced them with computer labs and now they\u2019re regretting it because there\u2019s kind of a return to darkroom photography. All the way back to people making daguerreotypes,\u201d he says, referencing recent work of photo-based portraitist Chuck Close.\u00a0<\/strong>\u201cIf you have the broadest knowledge base, then as an artist, you can pick and choose what you need for that idea.\u201d<\/p>\n There is a lot to absorb in Marotta\u2019s office \u2013 likely not as much as there once was. He is packing up today, mostly his many books, and acknowledges he will miss it here. At the time he arrived at the U, most university photography departments were located in basements. \u201cWhen they gave me this office on the second floor with a window and a view of the Salt Lake Valley I said, \u2018Oh, my god, this is\u00a0my<\/em>\u00a0space? Look at all this natural light.\u2018\u201c He\u2019s still thrilled about the window after 38 years.<\/p>\n “Paris is a photograph torn in half”<\/p><\/div>\n <\/p>\n “Triple Paris”<\/p><\/div>\n One enormous image of a European park above the couch demands attention. Another large photograph hangs at right angles to it. These, he says, are the last of his large-format images. He no longer will have access to a darkroom (it\u2019s not everywhere you can do a 4\u2019 x 6\u2019 photograph, at least not in silver, he remarks) \u2013 and he doesn\u2019t have an office at home, either.<\/p>\n Marotta creates dreamscapes in variegated black and white: an avenue of \u201cmanicured\u201d plane trees in a formal Paris park with a beckoning bench or two. There\u2019s a sparse bit of writing running across the bottom of the photograph regarding, among other things, two violinists playing in the distance, \u201cswaying with each gesture.\u201d A swatch of tape (French Ultramarine seems too clever \u2013 let\u2019s just call it blue) unites the image with the photograph to the right of it, which simply depicts the lower third of a slender tree trunk surrounded by crunchy fallen leaves. The text continues its march along the lower edge and helps blend the two images into a sort of story for the viewer to parse together, to interpret what the images have in common, what they are of, what they mean.<\/p>\n He uses a variety of cameras, from an 8 x 10 view camera to a square format Hasselblad, but the camera he uses most often is a small 35mm Leica. \u201cThe camera really hasn\u2019t changed that much since it was introduced in the 1920s. It has very limited control: depth of field, shutter speed, focus, that\u2019s it. I can bring it up to my eye quickly, take a photograph and put it down. I shoot it and I know I have a negative and I don\u2019t have to take any more pictures. I can go to Paris for a week and shoot two rolls of film and get what I\u2019m looking for. With digital, people just keep taking pictures, so one of them will be good.\u201d Marotta shoots digital, but treats that camera just like his Leica, thinking about the shot and typically taking just one.<\/p>\n “Something About Trains”<\/p><\/div>\n <\/p>\n “Rome Stories”<\/p><\/div>\n \u201cI blame being an artist on my mother,\u201d Marotta muses. \u201cShe\u2019s the one who would take me to plays, who encouraged me to read, to go to museums, to the ballet, so I was interested in that kind of cultural world even as a 7- or 8-year-old. And she didn\u2019t have to drag me to do that \u2013 I liked it.\u201d He did some drawing and painting in high school but was really drawn to creative writing and literature in college. \u00a0\u201cAs writers you observe the world, you get your ideas from what you see \u00a0. . . It was the 1960s and there was a lot going on. And I just couldn\u2019t write it down fast enough. The camera seemed to be another way to do that,\u201d he recalls. \u201cI found that I could do it so quickly and it had this immediacy and so that\u2019s when I started photography, it was really my third year in college [State University of New York, Albany] and I got completely absorbed in it. I just loved it. I was maybe 21 and I just \u201cIt\u2019s the only thing that can stop time,\u201d he continues. \u201cAnd stop everything; that time and space continuum, and freeze it. Forever. And I think that the most important thing for me with photography is that it\u2019s a medium that\u2019s references are real life. When I look at a painting, I see a painting. And then I see subject. I don\u2019t care what the painting is of. I see it as an object, a new experience on the wall. And then it becomes a narrative. But when I look at a photograph, real trees, a real table — that looks like rain on a window and we all know about those things, we identify with it. We know what a park looks like in the fall. It may not be that park, but we know what that is. It could be Central Park, it could be Liberty Park . . . but that meant for me that you could make an image that had meaning for whoever was doing the looking, so there was no one definition for a photograph. I felt that the photograph allowed just this expansive way of interpreting it because we\u2019re all different. . . .I\u2019ve done a lot of portraiture but I prefer photographing places that are common to people. Places of transit, places where people are kind of in-between, are on their way. \u201c<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a>
\nphotographed everything.\u201d<\/p>\n