That Which is Absent | Thinking About Photo

Photographers and That Which is Absent

Winter 2024

December 28th - March 21st

This past Christmas Eve, my family and I watched American Symphony, a documentary on musician and composer, Jon Batiste and his wife Suleika Jaouad. The film covers the two artists during an intense time period; he is struggling to compose a symphony and she is being treated for cancer. Midway through the film, she is undergoing a bone marrow transplant while he is on the road performing - we see him finish a song, look out into the audience and say, "I'd like to dedicate this next one to Suleika." The audience bursts into applause, and then becomes quiet. We see him look down at the keyboard and stop ... and stop ... and stop, and during this long silence you feel the absence. It grows and grows to the point that you wonder if he will, or can, continue.

I was struck by what a profound presence absence can have; how large it can loom in our lives, how it can fill the room until there's nothing else. Art gives us the courage to face that void - it gives us a purpose - a way to translate those silent moments within ourselves and speak to the outside world. To paraphrase Batiste’s Grammy acceptance speech, art finds us in the moment we need it…and that’s true for both the creator and the audience. As I watched the film again on Christmas morning, the power and transformative nature of art settled in me. It's not therapy, but it can be therapeutic as it walks with us through the valley.

The photographers in this showcase have faced that absence with grace. Some have explored memory by creating spaces that allow us to reflect and reframe our own past. Others echo the heartache of those who are no longer with us, or use humor to celebrate those that are. Several have created spaces that have never existed - dreamlike landscapes that speak to a collective unconscious. We also have book reviews, from PhotoBook Journal, covering an excellent group of artists exploring this subject matter.

Sally Chapman

sallychapmanphoto.com

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Living in the Bubble

The Living in the Bubble series portrays my interior experience of isolation in my home while the world and its problems are outside the walls. I experience time as a loop that morphs through various rhythms as the objects of home and memory rearrange and repeat in various patterns as they drift though my awareness and focus. All is familiar but becomes detached within the varying arrangements.

I began exploring 19th century processes as a way to reconnect with the handmade aspect of printing photographs, particularly cyanotype. There is a physicality through the process of applying the sensitizing solution to the paper, setting up the exposure, and washing the prints.

As the coronavirus put us into isolation, I picked up pastels and started making marks on paper. From there I began to apply oil pastel to the paper before coating it with the cyanotype solution. The oil pastel acts as a resist to the cyanotype and allows the brilliant colors to compliment the blue of the cyanotype. This way of working demands a slowing down. I gave myself space and time to stop rushing and worrying about what I was going to do next. The mind became quiet with the simplicity of living within the current limitations of movement.

Jennie Fine

www.jennyfine.com

Monday

Tuesday

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FOOD or WOMEN's WORK

The Cult of Domesticity is a term used by historians to describe the prevailing value system among upper- and middle-class white protestants in America and the United Kingdom during the nineteenth century. This ideology identified that “true women” should be restricted to the home and possess four cardinal virtues: piety, purity, domesticity, and submissiveness. Today, I still feel the lasting effects ideology has had on the role of women in the public sphere.

My Granny Caldwell is a card-carrying member of The Cult of Domesticity and often mourns my failed womanhood. I made this series of collages at home with my grandmother over Christmas, while most women tend to the emotional and physical labor of creating a loving refuge for their spouses and children.

FOOD or WOMEN’s WORK is a series of hysteria-induced mixed media collages created from imagery culled from 1950s cookbooks and male cut-outs from my elementary school yearbooks.

FOOD or WOMEN’s WORK, 2019-ongoing, 16”x20”, mixed media and digital collage

Amy Friend

@amyquerin

Every Night

We Are Reflections

Look at Them

That is How the Light Gets In

Oyster Sea

Are We Stardust

Dare alla Luce

The ideas for this work began many years ago during shared conversations I had, with my eldest and closest relative, my Nonna, while viewing familial photographs. She shared memories and thoughts as we sat together looking through the images. Her life was present in the photos we viewed with scenes of her homeland shared by family across oceans…there were images of wartime, weddings, babies, landscapes, family, and everyday moments. However, in these images from her life there were times when she misplaced a memory, name, or circumstance. This experience pulled me in - and I considered the potential of photographs as objects and what meaning they hold when much of their provenance becomes lost. I also considered how personal photographs shape an understanding of our individual world and what differences exist in familial imagery. In other words, what photos are out there and why? What do they say and what do they hide? How can I make us see them again and if we take the time to look what will we see?

Instead of focusing on my own familial photos, I decided to collect vernacular photographs from a variety of sources. Through multiple experiments and studio processes, I eventually hand pierced these photos in order to allow light to flow through the piercings. I will expand on the reasons for my process further in this statement.

The series title, Dare alla Luce, is an Italian reference to childbirth and a literal translation meaning “to bring to the light”. It beckons us to think about how we understand the medium of photography. It comes from the light after all. It is capable of being born over and over as we are changed each time we encounter images. Their fixed visual form is changed by our experience of them and our understanding of photography. It is in this sense reborn complicity.

I worked on this project for several years with large periods of inactivity as I became engrossed in the abundance of images for sale. I contemplated what this act of collecting meant. As a part of my process, collecting informed and shaped my interpretation of the imagery I found.

I was engulfed in the mystery of who “we are”. The photos represent a bit of “us” and by “us”, I mean, our world – both the familiar and distant. And yet, there are monstrous amounts of photos that are not found in the bric a brac of vernacular sales. Specific demographics, moments in history, and time periods are mostly missing - unrecorded, lost, or hidden.

What I present is both a “snapshot” of photographs that have been set aside, collected, with a limited provenance. These photos offer us a place to stop, observe and reflect on their moments of mystery, beauty, oddity, joy, solitude, nostalgia and even creativity. I imagine that I am working collaboratively with photographers and the subjects that I have never met. I am sharing their world with my world and engaging with who we are, what was and now, what is.

We are incredible; existence is incredible.
And yet, there is so much left out of the series. The images that exist and were available to me had the opportunity to be there –to be recorded. What is not present is reflective of photography’s limitations – we are not universally recorded, remembered, storied.

Soomin Ham

www.soominham.com

Family Vacation

Family Portrait

Back to Heaven

Mother Portraits

Wedding

Mother and Son

Sound of Butterfly

Sound of Butterfly presents an experimental yet personal approach to understanding and loss, grief, and memories through my mother's journey. Butterflies were one of my mother’s favorite things, but to me, they also symbolize a new journey. Sound of Butterfly is presented in the photographic series: Back to Heaven, Frozen Moment, and Memory of Ashes.

After the tragic loss of my mother, I began collecting memories and belongings that she left behind. To cherish my mother's life, I created my first series titled Back to Heaven, which is also the name of her favorite Korean poem that reflects on the fleeting nature of life, moments of joy, and happiness. The series consists of 12 reproductions of old family photos featuring soft, blurry images of photographs of my mother.

To create this series, I re-photographed a selection of photos from family albums, including

portraits of my mother, vacations, weddings, and group portraits, and printed them on rice

paper. The rice papers were then submerged in water, washed, and dried repeatedly until

the images grew dim. Finally, the prints were placed outside during snowfall and

photographed again, capturing the moment when the images began disappearing under the

fallen snow.

This entire process became a visual metaphor that helped me not only gain a deeper understanding of the cycle of life and fading memories but also embrace my grief by tracing

the path of my mother’s life.

Keith Taylor

keithtaylorphoto.com

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Otherworld

“The Kepler Mission, NASA Discovery mission #10, is specifically designed to survey a portion of our region of the Milky Way galaxy to discover dozens of Earth-size planets in or near the habitable zone and determine how many of the billions of stars in our galaxy have such planets.” — NASA

OTHERWORLD uses photographs taken in the upper Midwest to render possible models of the Earth-like planets currently being sought by NASA’s Kepler mission, and it also references the mythologies of many cultures that establish a land that is home to spiritual beings or the dead. These mythical other worlds of hope or doom often share characteristics with our familiar earthly landscapes, and I am using photographs of real places to suggest realms that may or may not exist. My preliminary images use barren terrains to suggest the earthlike landscapes photographed by rovers and other missions in space. As an immigrant, the landscapes of the upper Midwest continue to surprise me. This adds a personal layer to my depictions of territories that appear familiar yet remain unknowable.

OTHERWORLD is informed by an earlier project, DARK MATTER, which I made in conjunction with the Jerome Foundation and the Minnesota Center for Book Arts. Where DARK MATTER focused on a specific site, Otherworld is more of a fanciful musing on our curiosity. We send missions deep into space to search for evidence of other possible worlds, and we create mythological homes for our gods and our dead. How can I depict the geography of our desire? I use this world to create models of others, exploiting the dark tones to create barriers for understanding, always holding something back.

These images are digital scans of the original silver-gelatin prints.

PhotoBook Journal

photobookjournal.com

I'm pleased to welcome back PhotoBook Journal with selections from Gerhard Clausing, Douglas Stockdale and their team of Contributing Editors on books that explore our theme, That Which is Absent.

The reviews are on a separate page, use this link.

Water Showcase Identity Showcase