{"id":39899,"date":"2018-11-06T14:02:52","date_gmt":"2018-11-06T20:02:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=39899"},"modified":"2019-01-07T19:30:55","modified_gmt":"2019-01-08T01:30:55","slug":"the-cameras-power-artists-at-alice-gallery-julie-nester-and-umfa-explore-the-past-present-and-future-of-photography","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/the-cameras-power-artists-at-alice-gallery-julie-nester-and-umfa-explore-the-past-present-and-future-of-photography\/","title":{"rendered":"The Camera\u2019s Power: Artists at Alice Gallery, Julie Nester and UMFA Explore the Past, Present and Future of Photography"},"content":{"rendered":"
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“Prevailing Winds” by Yang Yongliang<\/p><\/div>\n

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You don\u2019t take a photograph, you make it.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u2014Ansel Adams<\/p>\n

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In a decade shy of 200 years\u2014since its invention by British artists seeking a faster, easier way to draw from life\u2014photography has joined those two great clich\u00e9s of human invention, fire and the wheel, as a universal extension of the human body. Even before the cellphone camera and the selfie swamped the field, the camera\u2019s power to record daily life, from its most mundane moment to the most extraordinary events, didn\u2019t just outpace its modest, artistic goals, but absorbed and transcended them: by now, the camera has provided an encyclopedia of vision, and documentary photos, whether the subjects were found or created to be photographed, have become the most influential photographic artworks, capable not only of capturing visual reality, but of creating pictures of anything the mind can imagine.<\/h4>\n
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“Red Flowers,” Jan Andrews<\/p><\/div>\n

In an age when artists were expected, more than anything else, to be not just new, but revolutionary, the search for something new to photograph became a primary challenge, and the field has become cluttered with variations on familiar subjects and approaches. It\u2019s not surprising, then, and not even a criticism, really, to note that the primary effect evoked by the photos of Jan Andrews and Trent Alvey, closing in a few days at the Alice Gallery, is deja vu. Putting it as simply as possible, they display between them the two dominant strategies of photography: Andrews points her camera at something familiar that she intends to reveal in a new way, while Alvey creates some visual effects not to be looked at, but for the sole purpose of making pictures of them.<\/h4>\n

Looking more closely, Andrews inverts the intentions of the architect Joseph Paxton, whose invention of the greenhouse coincided with that of photography, and who intended to make the secrets of nature accessible, decodable even, to everyone by bringing them indoors. Andrews turns her back on his scientific intentions to draw on the accidental abilities of glass and water to evoke mysterious emotional qualities. Alvey, whose blend of art and science exceeds Paxton\u2019s, swirls pigment on the surface of water, summarizing in a single effect many of the aesthetic results of her lifetime spent exploring the intersection of natural and human histories. She, too, is concerned with fleeting emotions, but finds analogues to them in natural science.<\/h4>\n

A gallery full of paintings of a single subject may liberate the audience\u2019s vision and whet their visual appetite, but a similar room full of photographic interpretations finds few enthusiasts, quickly boring too many viewers. Between them, the Julie Nester gallery in Park City and UMFA\u2019s SALT program are currently showing eight artists who strive to overcome the limits photography has set for itself and operates within. Some return to the origins of the camera in painting, seeking a different path forward. Others seek to give the connection between their subjects and their audience the sense of imperative necessity they feel suited to the crisis of the moment.<\/h4>\n
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“NYC 3,” Carol Inez Charney,
Chromogenic print<\/p><\/div>\n

At Julie Nester, the choice was made to limit the number of works actually on view\u2014more are available than are shown\u2014in order to take advantage of one of photography\u2019s largely neglected powers. What we don\u2019t get when we look at a photo printed in a book, mounted in an album, or tossed into a box with others, is how the realism of the photo process permits the mind to imaginatively walk into the picture. Except in motion pictures, and less often now even there, most photos are shown much smaller than the mural format the gallery employs here. Only when the photos are this large can the physiological sense, the perception that there is room to come closer and enter the space in the picture, feel real.<\/h4>\n

Carol Inez Charney is an artist who self-consciously wants to take photography closer to its origins in painting, though of course the kind of painting she ultimately chose to make wasn\u2019t seen until much later: not only later in art history, but in the development of color printing chemistry. If the painters who invented photography were seeking a means to fix light on a surface, Charney could be said to liberate it, and to do so in works that recapitulate both the sequence of events that led her to work the way she does and the thought process that brought her there. The stained-glass windows that initiate the visual conversation in each photo provide a richly textured, brilliantly-colored plane, one that is well lit and easy to focus overall. The leaded, geometrical patterns in the windows provide subject matter that is easily grasped and appreciated, while the objects beyond, the things outside blurred by the window, provide a sense of depth and a hint of mystery. Yet Charney doesn\u2019t stop there; rather, she prints those pictures and reshoots them through a second pane of glass, one nearer the camera and covered by water, flowing or frozen, that sets up a dynamic event, full of accidents playing out in multiple dimensions. The window is liberated from its architectural setting, the light and colors freed from their specific origins as well. She makes full use of the brilliantly saturated colors available today, and combines the two dominant approaches by both finding a new aesthetic approach to photographing a familiar subject and <\/em>constructing something new to present to her lens.<\/h4>\n
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“Wilderness 02076-6-07,” Deborah Bloomfield,
Archival Pigment Print on Epson Premium Luster Pape<\/p><\/div>\n

Debra Bloomfield\u2019s recent collections, Oceanscapes <\/em>and Wilderness,<\/em> explore two of the Earth\u2019s realms least altered by human intrusion, a point which she emphasizes by depicting them with neither human presence nor, with rare exception, manmade marks. The places she explores are predominantly cold, wintry scenes of leafless plants and untouched snow, as if to clearly express her regret at the necessity of an incomplete world, one where keeping people out is the only way to preserve Nature. Her colors tend toward pale, almost insubstantial hues, near-white foregrounds and white skies, their otherwise invisible meetings delineated by a distant shoreline or pierced by the vertical trunks of naked trees. Bloomfield\u2019s empty landscapes, however expansive, hark toward a world of nature that does not include\u2014some will hope has survived\u2014the presence of humanity. Given those ecologists who now believe that since 1970, mankind has killed 60% of the world\u2019s wildlife, she will not go without an audience who agrees with, even takes comfort in, her vision.<\/h4>\n
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“Fox-I,” Nine Francois,
archival pigment print.<\/p><\/div>\n

Portrait photographers long ago settled on a formula: use a long, almost telephoto lens and stand away from the subject. The goal is what\u2019s called \u201cgood drawing,\u201d wherein the features are flattened and seen at their best. Snapshot cameras, including cellphones, use wide-angle lenses that are always in focus, but unflatteringly exaggerate closer features, going so far as to produce the familiar \u201cfish-eye\u201d look. (Experts will point out that it\u2019s not the lens that produces these effects, but the actual distance from lens to subject, which the different lenses allow the freedom to change.) Most nature photography is necessarily done at a distance, requiring the longer lens and producing the familiar Disney-slash-National Geographic, remote effect. Nine Francois rejects this, opting instead to use a wide-angle lens and charge as close as she can to her animal subjects, achieving a visual intimacy that includes the animal\u2019s discomfort in a close encounter they associate with predators and prey. Instead of typical, iconic images, with their dishonest equation of the viewer and the viewed\u2014showing us the wild the way we want to see it, on an equal footing and with the animals in command of their appearance and its impact\u2014she shows us the animal world as it so often really is in its encounter with humans: finding themselves at a disadvantage.<\/h4>\n

Many photographers use the camera like a scalpel, opening up appearances to inspection. Vanessa Marsh and David Levinthal use it to examine mythic elements of landscape and its relation to people. What makes this timely is that while myth was long thought a deeper form of truth, today it\u2019s more often a synonym for \u201cmisrepresentation.\u201d Both artists also appear to spend more time modeling subjects to photograph than actually shooting them. Marsh\u2019s silhouettes of readily identifiable horizon features, superimposed on spectacular night skies, may have been inspired by a visit to a planetarium. If so, it\u2019s good to see someone finally bringing that bit of childhood magic out into the daylight. Levinthal\u2019s Wild West series further mythologizes a pre-existing myth. His realistic settings and same-scale toy figurines represent the myth, while his large format Polaroid camera limits the depth of field\u2014the distance between the nearest and the farthest things in the picture that are in focus\u2014so that what he depicts seems much larger than it is, and distances, such as to the out-of-focus backgrounds, seem as vast as the West, itself.<\/h4>\n