Griffin News

Ryan Zoghlin | Lacus Plasticus

Posted on June 17, 2020

The Griffin Museum of Photography is pleased to announce a new exhibition from artist Ryan Zoghlin. Known for his use of alternative photographic processes, Zoghlin has created a series blending creativity, science, technology and the environment building a fanciful series call Lacus Plasticus.

plastic under black — “lacus plasticus 27”, © Ryan Zoghlin

Many artists look to our surroundings to explore their creativity, and Zoghlin has found that inspiration off the shores of Lake Michigan. Repurposing plastics to create unique underwater environments using the light of the sun with the Photogram process, these one of a kind images tell the story of a natural habitat from unnatural sources.

Hanging in our Atelier Gallery, Lacus Plasticus is a creative adventure of exploration.

royal plastic — “lacus plasticus 31”, © Ryan Zoghlin

In anticipation of his Artist Talk happening Thursday June 18th, we asked Ryan a few questions about his work.

Your whole body of work seems to come from a place of art as object, that each piece is unique and handmade. What drew you to use alternative and historic processes to complete your vision?

“Porthole 1′, © Ryan Zoghlin

I have always been interested in the perceived power of objects. Rabbits feet for luck or an evil eye to ward off bad luck. Even more so with personal objects. Objects owned by lost relatives or the famous seem to have greater gravity. I used to collect daguerreotype cases. Most had portraits in them. How important these pieces must have been to those who knew the folks photographed. Now their value is mostly in the case. The power of these images has been greatly diminished by the loss of personal attachment over time. For me the process I choose is one that I think will best support the subject. I also love to see the hand of the artist in the work. Historical processes lend themselves to this better. I am not against contemporary ways of image capture at all. For my aesthetic, though, I find there are instances where I see it as too perfect.

How did you decide on the photogram process for Lacus Plasticus?

“lacus plasticus 23”, © Ryan Zoghlin

A previous series of work I did titled “Bagged” was done as cyanotype photograms also. These pieces where made to document objects organized in clear plastic storage bags. The shadows created very three dimensional reproductions of the objects in the bag. With Lacus Plasticus, I wanted to be able to translate the plastic pieces’ dimensionality onto the flat paper.

I love the stories that you tell with these objects, yet there is no clear storyline in your titles? Why not?

“lacus plasticus 29”, © Ryan Zoghlin

When I first started Lacus Plasticus, I went to the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago to get a better feel for the behavior of aquatic animals. Many of the exhibits are about the same size and shape, very much like windows. Also the descriptions are very scientific, lots of Latin. I wanted the same tone. One of scientific discovery or method. The titles are more about documentation than narrative.

What do you want us as viewers to walk away with after seeing your work?

“Porthole 4”, © Ryan Zoghlin

My work is always personal to me. As the saying goes, what is personal is universal. As an individual views the work, I hope they can relate on their own personal level and make their own decisions about the subject. Some may care about plastics in our fresh water lakes. Some may not care at all. My goal is to present issues that concern me. My hope is it will concern others.

About Lacus Plasticus –

For almost 40 years, I’ve been sailing off the beaches of Lake Michigan. As a kid and now a father with children, I’ve always loved the shore. As time has marched on, I’ve noticed the increase in plastics on the beach year after year. A few years ago, I started collecting and disposing of the plastic bits I would find. Now I collect plastic to create photogram photographs. The images depict plastic parts and pieces as underwater creatures. The pieces dramatize, for now, a fictitious state where plastics displace nature.

“lacus plasticus 12”, © Ryan Zoghlin

About Ryan Zoghlin –

My memory of a love for photography started early on. Using my father’s Pentax Spotmatic during a family road trip to Cape Canaveral, I clearly remember taking photographs of an early rocket sitting on its launch pad. By 14, I had my own darkroom and was very fortunate to have a very good photography department in my high school. This gave me the tools to move on to Rochester Institute of Technology, where I gained a solid technical background in photographic illustration. Wishing to explore photography as fine art and art in general, I moved on to study at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where I received a BFA in photography and sculpture in 1991.

so much plastic — “lacus plasticus 31”, © Ryan Zoghlin

My personal pursuits in photography have not waned through the years. Though my subject matter is varied, the intensity and thought put into each project is the same. While some work has been produced as digital prints from both color negatives and digital files, most of my work is done traditionally in a personal darkroom that I’ve maintained for the last 35 years. In the same time, I’ve used many alternative processes such as kallitypes, ambrotypes, cyanotypes, and orotones in my art. My work in orotones has been included in the Getty Conservation Institute’s Research on the Conservation of Photographs project.My work has been a part of the Museum of Contemporary Photography’s Midwest Photographers Project in Chicago and is in the collection of the Museum of Fine Art in Houston, TX. A recipient of an Illinois Art Council Fellowship and a Buhl Foundation Grant, I have also been featured in publications including Black & White Magazine, Photography Quarterly, Diffusion Magazine, Camera Arts Magazine and Photo District News, as well as many others. I am currently represented by Etherton Gallery in Tucson, AZ and Obscura Gallery in Santa Fe, NM.

Minny Lee | Artists Photobook Initiative

Posted on June 16, 2020

As part of the Griffin’s online offerings, we have a quarterly highlighted photobook artist. The artist currently featured is Minny Lee. Her beautiful, one of a kind, hand crafted books are precious objects. Our Executive Director, Paula Tognarelli, is a collector of photo books, and she asked Minny some questions about her work and inspiration.

I am fascinated by your combination of hand crafting of your books and involving a publisher in some of the mechanics. How do you decide when to use a bindery or to work on them yourself. Why Datz Press?

Encounters Maquette © Minny Lee

Over the years, I made different kinds of books, from one-sheet folded zines to 270-inch long scroll books with a custom box. Of these books, I published two with Datz Press: Encounters (2015) and Million Years (2018). Making one’s own book allows one to explore a wide range of materials, sizes, and binding techniques. The main reason for working with a publisher is to produce a larger number of books more efficiently. This also helps to disseminate the finished book to a larger audience. The challenge was to find a publisher that could reproduce my hand-made books in accordance with my concept, which was finalized after creating many, many maquettes.

Encounters, © Minny Lee

In December 2014, a mutual friend introduced me to Sangyon Joo, the publisher of Datz Press who was living in New York City at the time. I wanted to publish Encounters in time for a solo show in Seoul, South Korea. Datz Press was for me, love at first sight. I loved the sample paper and books that Sangyon brought to our meeting. Luckily, Datz Press was able to make Encounters in an edition of 100 in time for the exhibition. I am eternally indebted to Datz Press for their superb craftsmanship, professionalism, sublime aesthetics, and not compromising.

My final maquette for Encounters was printed on a roll of 44 inch wide and 176 inch long thin rice paper, which contained five strips that I had to cut and fold. Because the images were dark and the paper was thin, it often got jammed. It took me two weeks to make five books. Datz Press, on the other hand, printed three pages per sheet and attached several sheets to make a one-piece accordion. The book surpassed my expectations.

Million Years Maquette © Minny Lee

While Encounters was a self-published book, Million Years was a collaborative project. When I showed my latest maquette to Sangyon, she advised me to add more poems and informational text. After I finished with the final maquette, Datz Press enhanced my design. The book turned out much better than my original maquette. Datz Press participates in book fairs in the US and in South Korea and my books are often included in the offered collection. That’s another perk of working with a publisher.

You have mentioned in past conversations with me that you like to make books that the reader/viewer “experiences”. How do you go about doing that?

Books are magical; they bring us to places we may never have been to and expose us to stories that we may have not heard. I consider a book as a time-based medium and an object of art. Books require physical interactions; one must turn the pages to view. The touch of paper and sound of the turning all add to a physical experience of the book.

Resonance, © Minny Lee

Encounters measures to 7.5 inch high and 5.5 inch wide. Its small size creates intimate viewing. The title “encounters” is letterpressed onto the front side of the pale blue softcover. The spine does not have anything written on it. Paper is off white. It mimics rice paper. Each spread (two facing pages) allows only one image. Most images sit on the right side of the spread. After thirteen images, a one-page essay appears in pale blue, san serif typeface. When the viewer finishes reading my essay, they may travel to their own memory about nature. That’s my intention or invitation created by this book. The accordion folds allow continuous reading of the book. When the content is pulled out, it stands as a sculptural piece.

With Million Years, the editing and sequencing of the book with images and poetry were placed carefully in order to take the viewer into a lateral journey. There are four foldouts (gate folds). The first foldout has four landscape images without borders, as if it were a panorama. The second foldout has four images slightly different from each other to convey movement of the plane. The third foldout has three different cloud images. The forth one contains a long poem. Perhaps the goal of an artist is to take the viewer into a private experience of the world.

As an art book artist it isn’t about words per se. How do you communicate a narrative? Or is that secondary to the experience?

Narrative can come in different forms. With Encounters, I let the images speak first, utilizing the rhythm and color of pictures. Then at the end, I offer a little narrative about my upbringing in South Korea. With Million Years, images from the West Coast to the East Coast on a single airplane ride in chronological order lead the narrative. Poems in between images reflect on geology of the Earth. I tried to weave images and text together that are not explanatory but complimentary.

To me, the relationship between pages becomes a narrative—the author’s intended journey or path to navigate the book. It’s like a movie. There are feature films and documentary films that are filled with narratives. Then there are experimental and abstract films. They seem not to have narratives but clips are put together in a sequence, which becomes the narrative of the film. Every sequence has an intention of the director who is guiding the viewer’s journey.

How did you connect to books as a way of expression? How was that relationship forged?

Various artist’s book by Minny Lee.
Photo by Minny Lee.

The book as a medium is complex and challenging. As a medium of expression, I consider it as total art. A book can be visual, literary, sonic, experimental, performative, meditative, poetic, informative, scientific, investigative, and so on. I am attracted to the book’s ability to intertwine images and text. I take pleasure in designing the book and choosing the materials that meld its form and content together. Just like writing a novel, I can choose different voices, from the first person speaker to the third person speaker. I can travel across different time and place. Every part of the book requires decision-making, from the size of the font to the layouts to the margin of the pages. That deliberate decision-making requires me to be clear about my intention.

Artist Books, 2008 – 2019 © Minny Lee

When I was young, my father used to ask my siblings and I if we read this book or that book. My father read widely from literature to psychology to philosophy. I felt huge pressure to read to avoid disappointing him. My 8^th grade teacher donated 100 world classic literature books to the class. He taught Korean literature and wrote poetry. These two people influenced me greatly. I started to collect books since the mid 90s when I was living in New York. I love books for their intrinsic physicality and their ability to transport me into a different world. When I was studying Documentary Photography at the International Center of Photography, I took Susan kae Grant’s bookmaking workshop in 2008. I learned a lot during that two-weekend workshop. Soon I realized that I could make my vision or dream into a book. Over the years, I’ve been asking myself, “What is a book?” Each time I make a new book, I am trying to answer to that question.

What books are in your library?

I will share some of my favorites from my library.

Literature/Philosophy/Psychology

Roland Barthes – Camera Lucida (1), Image – Music – Text (2)
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha – Dictee (1), Apparatus: Cinematographic Apparatus (2)
Scott Fitzgerald – The Great Gatsby (1), Tender is the Night
Herman Hesse – Demian (1), Narcissus and Goldmund (2)
Alexander Von Humboldt Botanical Illustrations
Carl Gustav Jung – The Red Book (1), Man and His Symbols (2), Memories, Dreams, Reflections (3)
Li-Young Lee – Rose
Rollo May – The Courage to Create
Mary Oliver – A Poetry Handbook
Sylvia Plath – The Collected Poems (1), The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath (2)
Richard Powers – The Overstory
Marcel Proust – In Search of Lost Time
Andrei Tarkovsky – Sculpting in Time
Henry David Thoreau – Walden (1), Walking (2), A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (3)
Ocean Vuong – Night Sky with Exit Wounds (1), On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2)
Virginia Woolf – The Waves (1), Orlando: A Biography (2), To the Lighthouse (3)
Andrea Wulf – The Invention of Nature

Photobooks/Artbooks

Robert Adams – Summer Night, Walking
Jehsong Baak – là ou ailleurs
Barbara Bosworth – Behold (1), Fireflies (2)
John Cage – 4’ 33’’ (1), Silence (2)
Harry Callahan – Water’s Edge
Linda Connor – Luminance
Joseph Cornell – Wanderlust
Moyra Davey – Les Goddesses Hemlock Forest
Roy Decarava – the sound i saw
Andreas Feininger – The Mountains of the Mind
Masahisa Fukase – The Solitude of Ravens
Eikoh Hosoe – Barakei (Ordeal by Roses)
Bill Jacobson – Place (Series)
MongGak Jeon – YoonMi’s House
Sangyon Joo – Grace and Gravity
Kinsey Photographer: A Half Century of Negatives by Darius and Tabitha May Kinsey
Hilma Af Klint – Notes and Methods
Gapchul Lee – Conflict and Reaction
Wayne Levin – Islands, Jeju
Danny Lyon – I Like to Eat Right on the Dirt (1), Knave of Hearts (2)
Amanda Marchand – Night Garden
Duane Michals – 50
Daido Moriyama – Dazai (1), Memories of a Dog (2), Farewell Photography (3)
Philip Perkis – The Sadness of Men
Gerhard Richter – Atlas
Michael Schmidt & Einar Schleef – Waffenruhe
Dayanita Singh – Sent a Letter
Keith Smith – Structure of Visual Book
Ralph Steiner – A Point of View
Larry Sultan – Pictures from Home
Yutaka Takanashi – Toshi-e (Towards the City): Books on Books No. 6
Calvin Tomkins – Marcel Duchamp: The Afternoon Interviews

Who are your muses?

Nature

Mauna Kea

Sylvia Plath

Paul Cézanne

Duane Michals

KyungHwa Chung

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha

Kongji (my deceased dog)

Datz Press & Datz Museum

My classmates from the ICP-Bard MFA Program

About Minny Lee –

Minny Lee is a lens- based artist who is currently focusing on making artist’s books. Her work contemplates the concepts around time and space and the coexistence of duality. Lee was born and raised in South Korea and obtained an MA in Art History from City College of New York and an MFA in Advanced Photographic Studies from ICP-Bard. Lee was awarded a fellowship from the Reflexions Masterclass in Europe and participated in an artist-in-residence program at Halsnøy Kloster (Norway) and Vermont Studio Center. Her work has been exhibited at the Center for Fine Art Photography, Camera Club of New York, Datz Museum of Art (S. Korea), Espacio el Dorado (Colombia), Les Rencontres d’Arles (France), Lishui Photo Festival (China) among other venues. Lee’s artist’s books are in the collection of the International Center of Photography Library, New York Public Library, Special Collections at the University of Arizona, Special Collections at Stanford University, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Amon Carter Museum Library, and many other private collections. Lee was based in the greater New York area for more than twenty years and recently relocated to Honolulu, Hawaii.

See more of Minny Lee‘s work on her website. To learn more about her book projects see her website dedicated to her Artist Books. Follow her on Instagram here.

Corona | Dawn Watson

Posted on June 15, 2020

We close out our features on our online Corona exhibition with the powerful and graphic work of Dawn Watson. Message from Grace is a beautiful and unique vision of landscape with a call to action. Her work implores us to look, to experience, to take time and see what is around us. We asked her to be part of our online exhibition because her work shines a light both externally into the world around us, and emotionally radiates the soul of who we are in it. We asked her a few questions about her work, and what is next for her.

How does light play in your work?

I’m drawn to the play at the edge where light and shadow meet. My still life work takes advantage of the natural light that enters my home studio. The incremental, constant change of angle and intensity of direct sunlight or the softer fill of an overcast day means I need to be ever aware and responsive to what will best serve the mood or message. Being outside in the landscape requires the same intuitive presence as I am at the mercy of multiple elements but light is always the first defining aspect that I seek.

The Griffin featured Message from Grace in 2018. Your series plays on light and a new way of seeing our natural world. How did you find your palette to showcase the world around us?

While doing some research, I saw in a photo the color combination of brilliant blues and golds used for the external skin of the Mission satellites orbiting in space. By inverting my photographic image, these same tones appeared in the inverted field with little to no deeper adjustment to the color tone in the images. The reveal of the color negative upended my understanding of the natural elements. Sky became ground, sand a glacier, reflection a galaxy, invasive plant species delicate lacy delights, the brilliant sun a black hole.

In all of your images the combination of science, nature and visual engagement really invites us as viewers to experience and be thoughtful about our shared inhabited spaces. What is your hope for us as viewers to take away from your work?

There is this conversation of call and response in and with the natural world, each other, and the larger human community. How we respond now directly affects our future. Due to excessive human activity, weather intensifies, the world shape shifts and the familiar disappears. What is our relationship to loss, inequities, constant change? Where do we find shelter, sustenance and solace? How do we define beauty? What is its worth as the natural world morphs from the familiar to the unrecognizable and uninhabitable? My hope is this work inspires reflection that motivates action.

In this time of Corona, how do you find light in your day?

Forced confinement has been both a difficult challenge and, paradoxically, a gift granting me the chance to be still, to be quiet. Different each day, I track the passage of time as the sunlight makes it’s marks along the walls, ceiling, floors and furniture. I step outside often, turning towards the sun watching how it catches in the trees, how wind plays with the light.

What is next for you creatively? What are you working on?

Two new series have been gestating for a while. I was unsure of what I wanted to say and thought it best to let things be for a bit. Not until very recently did I reach some clarity. Drift/Bound visually translates my visceral response to how disconnected we feel as recent events have rocked our world. The crumpled, misshapen forms in my prints drift against fields of light and dark, unmoored, as we are, from any familiar world. ReRe is a still life series using saved plastic packaging material, natural elements and found or collected objects. It asks do we repurpose, recycle, redirect, reform and renew or let go of what remains?

About Dawn Watson –

After twenty-five years as a professional dancer, Dawn Watson shifted her artistic practice to photography, finding affinity in the visual storytelling offered by both live performance and the captured image. Watson’s photographic renderings continue to explore form, space, light, movement and storytelling, as she did as a performer. Nature serves as her muse, her subject of concern, a source of solace and healing.

Watson studied photography at the Maine Media Workshop, the ICP (International Center of Photography), as well as the Santa Fe Workshop. Her work has been featured online and in print, including in Lenscratch and The Hand magazine. She has exhibited her photographs and artist books throughout the United States and Europe including the Albrecht-Kemper Museum, A Smith Gallery, Center for Fine Art Photography, PhotoPlace Gallery, Ph21 Gallery, Tilt Gallery, Tang Teaching Museum, and in solo exhibitions at The Griffin Museum of Photography at Greater Boston Stage Company, the Los Angeles Center for Photography and Rhode Island Center for Photographic Arts. Her work is held in private collections and at The Lodge at Woodloch.

To see more of Dawn Watson‘s work log onto her website. Follow her on Instagram here.

Corona | J. Felice Boucher

Posted on June 10, 2020

J. Felice Boucher‘s beautiful image Goddess is one of our featured images from our online Corona exhibition. The radiant light emanating from her subject is a moving tribute to the power of a soul. Her exhibition at the Griffin in 2019, Center of Quiet, featured portraits of women facing forward and showing strength in their quiet moments. We asked her some questions about her work and how she sees light in her day.

How does light play in your work?

Light is photography. I went to visit a young photographer at her studio and she said that “old timers wait for the right light. They should just take the damn photograph and fix it in PhotoShop.” That broke my heart. It took me many years to understand light and to really see it.

We highlighted your image Goddess from Center of Quiet, an exhibition featured at the Griffin last year. The Goddess image really showcases her power and strength, radiating from her soul. How did you work with her to capture that?

I ended up photographing two beautiful sisters. I met one of the sisters at a bank where she was a teller. When I photographed her she invited her sister to join us and I photographed her too.

I love fabric and textures so I found fabrics that would highlight their gorgeous faces and skin tones. They have such strong and beautiful features so I wanted to capture those.

“Red Headed Girl” © Felice Boucher

Your images have a beautiful textural quality to them, like paintings. What led you to this technique to accentuate the quiet strength of your female subjects?

I do try to capture the strength of women in a direct sensuous but not sexual way. For me there is a huge difference between the two; sensuous and sexual. The light and texture in the Old Master paintings are compelling to me. So I add texture of colors over my photographs to give them a painterly look.

In this time of Corona, how do you find light in your day?

I haven’t photographed since the Covid-19 hit us. I had been photographing my models in a little corner of my bedroom and it is no longer a possibility to bring people into my home. But I am always photographing in my mind even without a camera in my hands. I love watching how light falls on someones face, on a landscape, or a strong shadow created by a flower in a vase.

“Forgiven”, © Felice Boucher

What is next for you creatively? What are you working on?

Good question. Who knows. On my walks I pass a neighbor’s mustard colored dingy and rust colored chickens in the warm evening light…that pulls at me.

About J. Felice Boucher –

J. Felice Boucher has been a photographer with a career that has spanned 27 years. She earned her BFA from the Maine College of Art, as a non-traditional student and single mother of two young children. And was awarded the Master Degree, Craftsmanship Certification by the Professional Photographers of America. She opened her photography business and photographed weddings, portraits and commercial projects both locally and around the country for over 23 years. Recently she has given up the wedding and portrait work and now focuses on real estate photography and her fine are work. Her fine art photography has appeared in museums, galleries and private collectors.

Corona | Liz Calvi

Posted on June 9, 2020

One of our featured artists in our Corona online exhibition, Liz Calvi’s work illuminates inner beauty and light. Her series, Lost Boys was featured at the Griffin in 2014. Her Corona highlighted image, Christian, comes from that series. We wanted to know more about the work, and how she finds the beauty and strength within her subjects.

How does light play in your work?

The relationship I have to light varies for each series I make, but I would say a common thread would be that light is a defining factor when I create my work.

David, © Liz Calvi

For Lost Boys in particular, I wanted to use natural light to express a quiet beauty and a feeling of reverie. When I made this series, the narrative depicted my generation highlighted the success of women in the workplace and the decline of a 1950s mentality of men as masculine financial providers. We left high school in 2008 and entered either the job market or college during a financial crisis. The narrative excluded the hardship that many of us were feeling and, coincidentally, how these new circumstances were chastising men for not living up to an outdated view of masculinity. The young men I photographed were all living at home (as was I) and I wanted to use light to show a softer side to masculinity while concurrently evoking empathy towards our generation.

We highlighted your image from the series Lost Boys, featured at the Griffin back in 2015. The connection you have with your subject is truly captured in this intimate moment. How did it come about?

Christian, © Liz Calvi

Christian and I are from the same town, our childhood homes are right around the corner from each other. We became friends in high school so we already had an established relationship prior to making this photograph. As with most of the young men I photographed for Lost Boys I didn’t go in with a preplanned idea. I went to Christian’s home one afternoon and we chatted while walking around the different rooms in his house. I surveyed the light while listening to his stories as he told me various memories he had from different places in his home. We took a few photographs that day, but I settled on this one in his room because of the balance between the distortion and grace in his gesture, complemented by the dappling light.

In this time of Corona, how do you find light in your day?

Booker, © Liz Calvi

I’ve tried to see this time in insolation as a way to reexamine my relationship to light and nature which we tend to overlook in our typical fast-paced consumer society. I’ve been using my digital devices less frequently and taking my camera outdoors or simply just enjoying nature hands free. Light has been providing happiness and relaxation for me, it has been a solace in our time of Corona. I’ve also been making time to reflect in the spring light and hope it provides others with a similar time for personal reflection but also a time to consider how our society is structured and what it prioritizes.

Installation View Ms. World, © Liz Calvi

What is next for you creatively? What are you working on?

Recently I’ve been focusing on the representation of women in digital spaces and how this impacts identity from an autobiographical and collective cultural memory lens. This direction has led me to make videos and writing to go with my photographs in larger installations. I finished grad school this past year and am in the beginning phase of research, writing, and storyboarding for new video work.

About Liz Calvi –

Liz Calvi (b. 1990 Hartford, USA) lives and works between London and NYC. Her practice encompasses photography, video, writing and installation works with critical concerns regarding performance, sexuality, autobiography, identity and digital media.

Calvi received her MFA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths 2019 and her BFA from the University of Hartford in 2012 after studying at Pratt Institute. Her work has been featured in numerous publications including Der Greif, Juxtapoz, Aint-Bad and Fader. Her photography has been exhibited internationally and is in several public & private collections. She has a limited- edition book in the permanent collection at Antenna in New Orleans as part of The Blue Library Vol 2

To see more work from Liz Calvi log onto her website. Find her here on Instagram.

Corona | Kevin Hoth

Posted on June 8, 2020

Holding a mirror up to our surroundings isn’t just an idea for Kevin Hoth. In his series Everywhere and All at Once, shown at the Griffin in 2018, Hoth uses a mirror to give us that fuller view. Reflection is important, especially now, in so many ways. In seeing the landscape as a fully sensory lived and shared experience, Kevin has given us a way to experience light and life in a new way. His image highlighted in our Corona exhibition, Overdub, is a perfect example of light and the ideas of Corona.

How does light play in your work?

Mohawk © Kevin Hoth

It’s funny, I almost never think about it but that is because I am so intimately involved with it on a daily basis. Light is always the raw material in my work, of course, though I don’t generally make work about it unless it relates to a particular project I am working on. During this time of coronavirus I have indeed been tracking the shadows in my home as a way to trace time. There is an arrangement of oblique light that falls on my daughter’s piano that I jokingly call “cubist piano time.” I’ve thought about making an image every time it falls like this and then create a tiled image of all of these fractured pianos. Some plant shadows have featured in some of my work but it usually is just for play or observational practice with an instant film camera. We are also creatures borne of light. All the sustenance that we require comes from sunlight.

We are featuring your image Overdub, from your series Everywhere and All at Once. Your creation of a visual landscape that incorporates multiple directions showcases a unique way of seeing. How did you find your vision? What was the first image in the series that pushed you forward to work that way?

Overdub, © Kevin Hoth

I have always enjoyed noticing other spaces in reflections. About ten years ago I made some images looking into windows and I thought about how there were three spaces represented: the surface of the glass (a flat space but still a space to be rendered), what was inside the building, and what was behind me. So I think the consciousness of multiple spaces within one frame, from one vantage point was a growing seed inside me. The Everywhere And All At Once project really came from a mix of play and accident which is where all great discoveries come from. I was experimenting with mirrors back in 2012 for about a year and then set it aside as I didn’t know where it was going. Later a friend asked about the series so I picked up the mirror again and took it with me on hikes and road trips. I made an image of a mountain side connecting to a cloud, then one horizon line connecting into another and that is where my “ah-ha moment” occurred. As a photographic observer I often feel like I can see everything at once at one time. It’s almost a physical sensation. This project is a way for me to evoke that sensation. I also feel most alive in open, natural spaces and the expansiveness is something I am trying to show albeit from my singular vantage point.

Does the use of the mirror also hold a metaphorical gaze for you? In how we look at landscapes? What would you like viewers of your work to walk away with after seeing your photographs?

Cloud and Rock © Kevin Hoth

I suppose I’d like people to see what I see or at least feel some sensation of how I observe. I want the gaze here to be almost a disembodied or maybe a universal one. Although I am conscious that not all people have the same comfort level or privilege of being alone in a landscape. Some have noted a visual fragmentation in these images which one could liken to a Cubist viewpoint. Again, the idea here is merging several angles of view into one image even though I am combining them in one instant. I have made more of a conceptual connection to the way people often view landscapes through a phone screen. I’ve made a fair amount of this work in National Parks and when you stop at a prescribed viewpoint you see the phenomenon of the quick phone grab. We often are too busy looking through our phones to frame the right shot. Of course, I am also “guilty” as I am meditating my view through a camera.

In this time of Corona, how do you find light in your day?

I appreciate small things maybe in the same way a child would. Light falling on the floor from my skylight, shadows from a tree shifting on my window shades in the afternoon. A red-orange poppy coming up in my yard is a celebration for me. Color fills me up in extremely energizing ways. My current work is around flowers and I am endlessly fascinated by them. My daughter is also a constant source of joy and light for me. I’m not sure how I would be doing without long hugs with her.

What is next for you creatively? What are you working on?

I have been experimenting with instant film for quite some time and am currently working on a series called Immortal Chromatic. I photograph flowers that keep their color even after dying and then I create large instant film mosaics from these source images. I cut and burn the instant film “tiles” as they develop. The theme of creation and destruction has been part of this work with flowers across multiple projects. I am also integrating paint and thread into these physical pieces as well. They are photographs but they are also sculptural objects.

about Kevin Hoth –

Kevin Hoth is an artist working with photography, video and performance. His current work deals with perception and the manner in which multiple spaces can be formed into a singular frame. Kevin also works heavily with deconstructed instant film to explore themes of creation/destruction, truth as it is represented in photography, as well as beauty and transience.

Kevin Hoth in his studio

Kevin has shown work in over one hundred exhibitions nationally and internationally, including recent exhibitions at The Dairy Center for the Arts, The Rhode Island Center for Photography, The Houston Center for Photography, and The Center For Fine Art Photography. His work will be part of the Qualities of LIGHT symposium at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson in January of 2020. Recent awards include Top 200 Critical Mass, Center For Fine Art Photography Portfolio Showcase 12 and top ten finalist in the New Orleans Photo Alliance 2018 Clarence John Laughlin Award. Kevin recently completed an artist residency in January of 2019 in Brazil and explored how varied perceptions of time can be represented.

Kevin has taught college courses in photography, graphic design, and multimedia art at numerous universities and currently teaches at the University of Colorado Boulder where he has taught since 2011. He lives with his daughter in mountainous Boulder, CO and gets regularly woken up by coyote cries, owl hoots, and horse whinnies.

Fun facts: He did a stint as a full-time graphic designer for an Amazon.com company, made an interactive garment with force sensors that played odd bodily noises back in 2006, collaborated extensively with a modern dance company as a VJ, and played bass in a Seattle band that once played live on KEXP-Seattle.

To see more of Kevin Hoth‘s work, log onto his website. Look here follow him on Instagram.

Elsa Dorfman

Posted on May 31, 2020

Yesterday, we lost the coolest of the cool. Onward, Elsa.

Elsa Dorfman, photographer whose distinctive portraits illuminated her subjects and herself, dies at 83

By Mark Feeney Globe Staff,Updated May 30, 2020, 12:12 p.m.

Ms. Dorfman, photographed at her Cambridge home on Feb. 4, 2020.JONATHAN WIGGS/GLOBE STAFF

Elsa Dorfman, whose large-format Polaroid color portraits made her famous in the world of photography, and whose ebullient personality made her famous in the world of Cambridge, died Saturday at her Cambridge home. She was 83.

According to her husband, the civil-liberties lawyer Harvey Silverglate, the cause of death was kidney failure.

Ms. Dorfman is likely the only artist to have work in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, National Portrait Gallery, and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art who’s also twice had the Cambridge City Council pass resolutions in her honor, in 1998 and 2014.

She became even more famous in 2017, with the release of Errol Morris’s documentary about her, “The B-Side: Elsa Dorfman’s Portrait Photography.”

“A fabulous friend and artist,” Morris wrote in an e-mail on Saturday. “It’s hard even to imagine the world without her in it.”

In his Boston Globe review of “The B-Side,” Ty Burr wrote that Ms. Dorfman “seems to instinctively understand photography’s knack for simply snagging a moment, and she has gradually extended that moment — that nanosecond of seeing — from herself to her family to a community at large. A Dorfman portrait may be the closest one can come to an embrace from your Nana: It’s fast and fierce and loving and uncritical, and the perfume lingers long after the moment is gone.”

Or as Ms. Dorfman says in the documentary: “I somehow have this misguided therapeutic idea that it’s my role in the universe to make people feel better.”

Earlier this year, the MFA mounted an exhibition of self-portraits, “Elsa Dorfman: Me and My Camera.”

Ms. Dorfman’s “My third day with the 20×24,” from 1987. MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, BOSTON

Three parts earth mother to two parts riot grrrl (or perhaps the other way around), Ms. Dorfman cut a memorable figure. Her beaming moon face, set off by glasses and center-parted hair, was almost as distinctive as her don’t-try-this-at-home fashion sense. Jumpers and running shoes? Of course. Polka dots and stripes? On occasion.

In conversation, Ms. Dorfman tended to be animated and voluble. Expressing agreement, she didn’t just say “right.” She would say “Right, right, right, right, right.” Expressing disagreement, something she did less often but was no less capable of, she would offer a slightly shrieky laugh before giving the other person a piece of her mind. It was a mind much given to digression. Ms. Dorfman would often begin sentences with “So, anyhow,” picking up the thread of a happily wayward thought.

Ms. Dorfman’s outsize personality matched the scale of the refrigerator-size Polaroid 20-by-24 camera that for many years dominated her studio in the basement of an office building between Harvard and Central squares.

The camera, one of only six in existence, weighs close to 240 pounds. Each photographic print is nearly 2 feet square. Ms. Dorfman likened extracting one from the camera to delivering a baby.

Several photographers have made extensive use of the 20-by-24 Polaroid camera, including Mary Ellen Mark, Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, William Wegman, and Chuck Close. None has been as associated with it as much as Ms. Dorfman.

Like normal-size Polaroid instant cameras, the 20-by-24 makes a unique print, developed within the camera and then extruded from it. The resulting image is extremely detailed, with notably full, rich colors.

“I somehow have this misguided therapeutic idea that it’s my role in the universe to make people feel better,” said Ms. Dorfman, with her camera in 2002.DAVID L. RYAN/GLOBE STAFF

Ms. Dorfman’s work has a distinctive look. She would use a white background, include white borders, and leave in the black roller lines. With characteristic lack of pretension, she referred to them as “tire marks.” The lines are left by the rollers inside the camera, which break the chemical pods used in developing the image.

Finally, using a steel-nib pen dipped in black India ink, Ms. Dorfman would write a caption on the bottom border and sign the image in her distinctive cursive. She started doing that with her photographs well before she began using the 20-by-24 camera, in 1980.

Ms. Dorfman’s work has always included text with image. Asked in a 2017 Globe interview if she had had youthful ambitions of being a photographer, she exclaimed, “Not a photographer, a writer!” Many of her closest friends were writers, poets especially, and much of her early work consisted of portraits of authors.

Ms. Dorfman’s Polaroid image of her with Peter Orlovsky and Allen Ginsberg. ELSA DORFMAN/COURTESY MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, BOSTON

Foremost among these friends was the poet Allen Ginsberg. Ms. Dorfman liked to say that when in doubt she would ask herself, “What would Allen do?” The exchange of influence worked both ways. When Ginsberg seriously took up photography, he adopted Ms. Dorfman’s practice, writing a caption and putting his signature on the print’s border.

The first 20-by-24 photograph Ms. Dorfman took was a dual portrait of Ginsberg and the poet Peter Orlovsky. It was a fitting start. Ginsberg and Orlovsky were partners, and Ms. Dorfman’s family portraits are her most celebrated work. As distinctive as the look of Ms. Dorfman’s big Polaroids is, their consistent emotional fullness and warmth may be even more unmistakable.

Ms. Dorfman originally charged $50 for a portrait sitting. By the time she stopped, around 2015, she was getting $5,000. On average, she’d do about 60 portraits annually. “I never did more than 80 a year,” she said. “It’s not a humongous number. The impact, in a way, was greater than the number.”

The title of Morris’s documentary comes from Ms. Dorfman’s practice of offering her subjects a choice of two prints. She would keep the one they didn’t take. She long thought of gathering her family portraits into a book. Since the families have the official print, the images in the book would be the alternates. Ms. Dorfman mentioned this to a sitter. “Oh, like the B-sides,” he said, the term used for the flip side of 45 rpm recordings. “I’m really a B-side person,” she said with a laugh in that interview.

The oldest of three sisters, Elsa Susan Dorfman was born on April 26, 1937, in Cambridge. She grew up in Roxbury and Newton. Her father, Arthur Dorfman, was a produce buyer for the Stop & Shop grocery chain. Her mother, Elaine (Kovitz) Dorfman, was a homemaker.

Ms. Dorfman majored in French literature at Tufts University, graduating in 1959. Moving to New York after graduation, she got a secretarial job at the publishing house Grove Press. That’s where she met Ginsberg, as well as the poets Robert Creeley, Charles Olson, and Robert Duncan, and the photographer Robert Frank.

“I didn’t grow up with an idea of possibility,” Ms. Dorfman said in that 2017 interview. “So I was lucky I ran into the people I did.”

It was not Ms. Dorfman’s first brush with fame. During a junior year abroad, she worked at the 1958 World’s Fair, in Brussels. The crime photographer Weegee tried to pick her up. After that, living in Paris, she became friends with Susan Sontag, who was staying in the same student hotel. “Her French was so much better than mine,” Ms. Dorfman later recalled.

Moving back to Boston, Ms. Dorfman got a master’s in elementary education from Boston College and taught fifth grade for a year in Concord. One of the more amusing moments in “The B-Side” comes when she recalls a sympathetic parent telling her, “You don’t really belong here.”

Ms. Dorfman felt the same way. At the parent’s suggestion, she got a job in the science department at Education Development Center, in Waltham. Serendipity struck. She was handed a camera, a Hasselblad, and put to work in the darkroom. Now, at 28, she declared herself a photographer.

Writer friends asked her to take their photograph. Grove used one of her portraits on the cover of an Olson essay collection. The photograph was her first professional sale.

In 1967, Ms. Dorfman met her future husband, Harvey Silverglate. He had been the defense attorney in a drug trial. Ms. Dorfman thought the case had the makings of a book and sought him out. At the end of that initial meeting, he said she should take a portrait of him and his brother to give to their mother. They married in 1976.

In 1971, Ms. Dorfman had an exhibition at Boston City Hall. No one had consulted with the mayor, Kevin White, who’d planned on holding a banquet for visiting mayors in that space. He ordered the photographs taken down. “You look cute when you’re angry, my dear,” he told a furious Ms. Dorfman, “but it’s my City Hall. If they were Rembrandts, and I wanted them down, they’d come down.”

Ms. Dorfman began selling her black-and-white 35mm photographs from a grocery cart in Harvard Square. Charging $2.50 a print, she took in $700 during the 1973 holiday season. “Wow, was it cold out there,” she recalled in 2017. “I loved coming home and counting the cash.”

A fellowship at Radcliffe College’s Bunting Institute led to “Elsa’s Housebook: A Woman’s Photojournal” (1974). Ms. Dorfman was the author of two other books: “No Hair Day” (2003), about breast-cancer patients, and “En Famille” (1999), a collaboration with her Grove Press friend Creeley.

Ms. Dorfman customarily ended her e-mails with one word: “Onward.” That word had been Creeley’s standard farewell. In tribute, Ms. Dorfman adopted it after the poet’s death. If she forgot to include it, she’d immediately send another e-mail that did. Her doing so said as much about her own attitude toward life as it did about her devotion to Creeley.

Asked in 2017 what she was proudest of, Ms. Dorfman gave a long pause before answering.

“I’m proudest of the fact that I made a life for myself. I think it’s a miracle. It’s a big thank you to a lot of people I came across. What enormous luck, because there are so many people who were more talented than I was who somehow got lost along the way. So I really feel lucky, and I was lucky in the people I met. . . . Meeting Harvey. I mean, there was no script!”

In addition to her husband, she leaves a son, Isaac, of New York; two sisters, Sandra, of Ashland, and Jane Steele, of Middlebury, Vt.; and two grandchildren.

Memorial services are planned for New York and Cambridge later this year.

Mark Feeney can be reached at mark.feeney@globe.com.

Corona | Meg Birnbaum

Posted on May 30, 2020

Meg Birnbaum, featured in our online Corona exhibition, is a master of playing with light and life. The Griffin featured Meg’s series The Sisters of the Commonwealth in 2014. Her images seek out to highlight the quiet moments in the day, and remind us to stop, take a deep breath and wonder about the world we inhabit. Her image, Lights in the Sky, exemplifies this vision. We asked Meg about this image, and about how she finds light in her day.

How does light play in your work?

I love natural light and prefer the golden hours. This photograph is a window reflection but I thought they could be fairy lights or daytime fireflies.

Lights in the Sky is one of my favorite images in the show. How did you create such a great photograph?

It was a lucky moment. I was finishing lunch in a restaurant and when I stood up to leave I saw that the retro lighting reflected magically in the window.

In this time of Corona, how do you find light in your day?

Mostly I find light in helping things grow, students or garden flowers. Also friends and family and dogs as role models – they always wake up optimistic.

What is next for you creatively? What are you working on?

I’m playing with loosely recreating the allegorical paintings by Simeon Solomon, an almost forgotten painter from 1850 or so. His career was destroyed by the scandal of being arrested twice for soliciting sex in a men’s public bathroom. He died alone, an alcoholic in a house for the desitute. I love his work and it is easy to see through it to what he was really wishing for had it been another time in history.

About Meg Birnbaum –

Meg Birnbaum lives and works in the Boston area. She is a photographer, graphic designer, and educator.

Her most recent solo exhibition was at The Stonewall Museum and Archives, Fort Lauderdale in 2019. She has been featured with solo exhibitions at Gallery Tanto Tempo in Kobe, Japan, Corden Potts Gallery, San Francisco, The Lishui International Photography Festival, China, the Museum of Art Pompeo Boggio, Buenos Aires during the biennial Encuentros Abiertos-Festival de la Luz, the Griffin Museum of Photography, Massachusetts, Flash Forward Festival, Boston, Davis/Orton Gallery, NY, and Panopticon Gallery, Boston.

Meg teaches portfolio building classes at the Griffin Museum of Photography. She a member of the Griffin exhibition committee and designs their catalogs, signage and website. Her work is held in the permanent collection of the Museum of Fine Art, Houston, the Lishui Museum of Photography in China, the Meditech Corporation, and private collections.

To see more of Meg Birnbaum‘s work log onto her website. Follow her creativity on Instagram

Corona | Julia Borissova

Posted on May 29, 2020

First seen in 2014 at the Griffin, Running to the Edge by Julia Borissova is a beautiful series mixing image and object. Finding vintage photographs and adding organic materials, Borissova creates a sensory experience creating images as unique objects. As a featured artist in our online Corona exhibition we asked Julia about her work, and how light fills her days.

How does light play in your work?

A man in formal diplomat dress has a curve of orange flowers covering his left chest as if a shield.

Light is an important part of photographic art and is paramount to the artist. I will not go into details of the light-sensitivity of the silver halides as a key to the photographic process. But when I see old photographs, when I hold images of people from the past in my hands, I think about those rays of light that reflected from their real bodies and reached me, me here, now. As Susan Sontag says about photography: “A photograph of a missing creature will touch me like a retarded star’s rays.” And this is what excites me the most in my work.

Your work takes vintage photos, layered with organic blooms and reconstructs narratives into new tales. In bringing light to these anonymous people, how do you know when you have found the right combination of organic textures and new memories.

Three women stand in a line with hats on and dressed in suits showing from the chest up. Daisy like flowers cover the top of their heads.

When I was working on the Running to the Edge project, I explored means of creating content in the photos through their physical presence as objects and connecting them with natural element. I was thinking about how our memory functions. When we recall something from the past, every time we create a different image, replacing some parts with new ones. I decided to try the same with photographs – adding flowers to the old photograph, I wanted to give them a new meaning, a new life. I specifically did not create any compositions, this happens intuitively.

Anonymity is important to you in your images. Do you find that these unidentified faces lift our general assumptions based on looks that allow the light to shine?

Woman in coat and hat with pink flowers for eyes.

My way is a different one. Found images can be always a source of my inspiration. I bought all the photos that I used while working on “Running to the Edge” project at a flea market or antique shop. These photos are connected with the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the first wave of emigration after it. Combining old photos and flowers petals, sometimes covering people’s faces and making them completely anonymous, I created an atmosphere of general and indefinite mourning for unknown to me people through the medium of photography, the medium that is traditionally valued for its claim to authenticity.

In this time of Corona, how do you find light in your day?

At this time, however, as always, creativity give me a sense of light, freedom and vitality.

What is next for you creatively? What are you working on?

A woman in a long dress is standing in front of a column and a purple flower covers her head and chest.

I am working on several projects, one of which is still in the research process. Also, I continue to develop my project DOM (Document Object Model). “DOM” means a house, home or building in Russian language. I explore how our concept of home is changing over time and the notion of home is transforming in connection with the place in which we live. We are all used to moving from place to place, but today we are forced to stay at home. My question is: How have current circumstances influenced or changed our concept of “home”? I would like to collect the opinions of different people and make a small book to remember this time.

Review of Running to the Edge by Igor Lebedev –

Memory rolls in like waves causing a sudden and acute experience which doesn’t refer to a life of a specific person. This memory is connected to a cultural stratum. Everything is mixed here, the present and the past, some old photo portraits telling the stories of life which were erased by flow of time, dried flowers that represent markers of what was important but was forgotten, the memories of what happened, but couldn’t be remembered. So we can see it all in the pictures of the new series “Running to the Edge” by Julia Borissova.

The imperfection of memory provokes an artist to restore it, so in her work she turns to archives again and again, systematically reinterpreting them at the new levels of personal awareness of not ancestral memory but the memory of the nation. Through its reconstruction it’s easier to recover what has been lost and what has continued as consequences of birth traumas which took place in Russian history so often.
An archive is an anonymous evidence of elapsed time. The anonymity is inherent in a multi-level cultural de-identification of the past. However, despite the apparent constancy of its anonymity, it is surprisingly ready to manipulation according to the needs of everybody who faces it.

Two Russian soldiers with purple flowers.

The material included in the archive has great variability of its stories, as a rule, on a superficial level, which can be read from the perspective of nostalgic feelings of the past time in the context of personal experience. But the work with an archive is not only a subconscious desire for nostalgic revival of the past or an affect of overcoming losses in a chain of generations, although it means also some sensual experiences. It is rather an intuitive feeling of the boundaries rigidly dissecting an established world order, an attempt to understand the reasons for the “explosion” that changes the lives of many generations. And, in the end, created statement based on fetishes (old photographs in this case), the objects of so-called personal museum according to Sigmund Freud is an expression of protest arising at the point where the traumatic overcoming of a loss merges with the desire to counteract the possibility of its recurrence in the future.

It seems that such attempt of expression protest is characteristic for Julia Borissova who in her works refers to events from Russian history connected with the revolution and after that the first wave of emigration. In the old pictures the author adds the multi-layer effect through the using collage technique. The pictures themselves already have the images of a distant, “frozen” by photography past while the fragments of flowers imposed on them marked the present undefined in the flow of time. The occurring in the gap of the past and the present becomes for the author the field of exploring her relationship with the historical predestination.

A man and woman in Russian formal dress with red flowers over eyes.

The people in the photographs can’t realize their future, but for the author it’s ajar from the other side, as the future-in-the past. This is the future as the opposite shore of rapid flow of history, which destroyed the whole world, erased the relations of collective memory, forced to experience the pain of the absence of something that wasn’t experienced. And the most important, provoked a conversation about the “deformed, broken world” made in our minds by the old Soviet and the new post-Soviet society in turns, whose features have collage nature.

Igor Lebedev,
curator, photographer, historian of photography

About Julia Borissova –

Julia Borissova is an Estonia-born, St Petersburg-based artist who works with photography, collage, installation and book making, to explore how history and memory are perceived through images. The book is her natural medium to contemplate real stories and blends documentary elements with imaginary things, trying to capture ephemeral, fragmentary and elusive memories.

A women's hips and partial legs cropped at the waist in a dress with pink flowers covering her from waist up.

Her artists’ books include: Looking for Dimitry (2019), Nomad (2019), Nautilus (2018), Let Me Fall Again (2018), White Blonde (2018), Red Giselle (2017), Libretto (2016), Dimitry (2016), J.B. about men floating in the air (2015), Address (2015), DOM (Document Object Model) (2014), Running to the Edge (2014), The Farther Shore (2013).

Borissova’s books can be found in the collections of many major institutions,including Tate Modern (London), Art Museum of Estonia Library (Tallinn), Victoria and Albert Museum (London), National Library of Spain (Madrid), Bibliographic Collection of The Municipal Archives of Lisbon, Centre for Fine Print Research. UWE (Bristol), Reminders Photography Stronghold (Tokyo), Indie Photobook Library (USA), the Library of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Phoenix Art Museum (USA).

Borissova has frequently exhibited her photography and books around the world in group and solo shows.

Education:
Academy of Photographic skills in 2009-2010.
Foundation of information and cultural projects “FotoDepartament”, program “Photography as a research”, 2011-2013.
Master class: Jan Grarup (Denmark, agency NOOR) class, 2011; Morten Andersen (Norway) class, 2011, 2012; Luuk Wilmering (Dutch) class, 2012; Anouk Kruithof (Dutch) class, 2013; Jaap Scheeren (Dutch) class, 2014; Workshop of the international photography magazine FOAM.

Awards:
2019 – FOTO WIEN Photo Book Award – shortlist;
2019 – Riga Photomonth – shortlist;
2018 – Encontros da Imagem, Portugal – finalist;
2018 – Kassel Dummy Award, Germany – shortlist;
2017 – Riga Photomonth – shortlist;
2016 – “Encontros da Imagem”, Portugal – finalist;
2015 – “Unveil’d Photobook Award – winner;
2015 – FotoFilmic, Canada – winner;
2015 – Belfast Photo Festival – winner;
2014 – San Francisco International Photography Competition;
2013 – 1st place “International Fine Art Photography Competition” (France);
2013 – The Baltic Photo Biennale – winner

Recent Solo Exhibitions –

2019 – Lullaby for a Bride, The first Factory of Avant-garde, Ivanovo, Russia

Recent Exhibitions –
2018 – Maybe an Island, Vitland, Kaliningrad;
2017 – Julia Borissova, Artists’ Books Exhibition, Centre for Fine Print Research, Bristol, UK;
2017 – Running to the Edge, Metenkov’s House Museum, Yekaterinburg;
2016 – Beyond the Seen, The Yard Gallery, Exeter, UK

To see more of Julia Borissova‘s work visit her website.

Corona | L. Aviva Diamond

Posted on May 26, 2020

Viewing the natural world and its tiny universes can lead to galactic ideas and visions. L. Aviva Diamond captures light and movement in visions that seem galactic in scale, yet look at small surroundings. Her connection to the landscape crafts celestial visions. Her image Light Stream N.2 is featured in our Corona online exhibition. We wanted to know more about this image and her work, so we asked her a few questions.

How does light play in your work?

My recent work is all about light and about the ambiguous primordial territory where light becomes water becomes air. Or where water becomes air becomes light. I love the blurring of boundaries between earth and sky, wave and galaxy, individual and universal, creation and destruction. One of the things that makes me really happy is when people look at pieces from this series and see aspects of their own belief systems and personal mythologies mixed in with the elemental energies…and when they see and feel something different each time they look.

Your artist statement says your work “encompasses both the outer world of street photography and nature photography and inner perceptions of a cosmos consisting of energy, light and movement”. Your Light Stream image embodies that narrative. How did the series come about?

I’ve been working on the Light Stream and Wave Nebulae series for about five years, but these pieces are all informed by 35 years of meditative practice. I was sitting on the sand in Newport Beach one afternoon meditating and gazing at the ocean when I suddenly saw stars and nebulae in the glints of light on crashing waves. Not long after that, I was at a retreat in Oregon and had similar experiences with the rushing streams there. It was as though the entire universe was encompassed in the play of light, water and air. So I began going deeper, shooting more, and developing ways to work with the images – painting with light and shadow in Photoshop to make the visual experience as close as possible to what I felt in my heart.

This process led me to a different way of seeing and a visual quest for the sacred in everyday life. I discovered that if I looked deeply enough, really delving beneath the surface, I started seeing the universe in almost everything – in a wave, bubbles in a stream, corrosion on a car hood, the broken arm of a cactus, my clogged kitchen sink. The vastness of the universe is contained in each of its parts; universal becomes cellular and vice-versa. The joy lies in the ambiguity and the reverberation. And the holiness lies in the light…or in the interplay between light and dark. It’s jazz – the music of the spheres – and a quest to distill the essence and mystery of light.

Light Stream comes from water reflections, while your series Celestial Rust also looks at the universe through a hardscape of metals. How do you find your cosmos? At what point do you know a texture goes from small idea to all encompassing universe?

Most of my more recent series are all connected – and all about seeing the cosmic in microcosm. A friend and I were walking back from an art show and saw a car with lots of rust and corroded paint. But it wasn’t just a car. Looking at the hood was like seeing NASA photos – galaxies and showers of stars, the universe in a badly-needed paint job. That’s how the Celestial Rust series started. But the mysteries lie just under the surface in EVERYTHING. Another series, Tiny Immensity, began with a leaf covered with dew. If you really look, though, the leaf contains the tree it came from…and the moon and stars. Scientists tell us that we are literally stardust, that the atomic material in our bodies can be traced to stars that exploded billions of years ago, that all biological life is truly connected, that we are linked to all the atoms in the universe. It’s mindblowing. But if you look deeply enough, you get hints. Recently, my disposal broke, and the sink was totally clogged. But the murky water also contained a woman washing her hair with stars.

In this time of Corona, how do you find light in your day?

Like most of us in the time of Covid-19, I ride the rollercoaster between hope and despair. I have a couple of risk factors and live in an area where people haven’t been wearing masks, so I’ve been inside since early March.

Everything feels so much more precious now that we realize how uncertain life has become. Time online with friends is a treasure. Musicians are livestreaming day and night, and both their music and their generosity are stunning. Friends are offering Zoom meditations, art support groups and jazz classes. In a time of so much darkness, people are shining with kindness and generosity. Yes, there are folks whose short-sightedness and selfishness knock me to my knees, but there are so many more people who are finding ways to help and to bring communities together. And that’s where the light lies. In a time of scarcity, we treasure what we have. We finally see its true value. The other day, I was slicing a carrot and became transfixed. I only had my old iPhone 6s, but I grabbed a few shots because in those carrot slices you can see the universe.
What is next for you creatively? What are you working on?This time is changing all of us in ways we still don’t understand, and I don’t know yet how all this will play out in my life – let alone my work.

But I will continue to reach for the sacred in everyday life and will attempt to share what I find. All of us have moments of heightened consciousness. For some people they come while playing an instrument or while praying, walking in the woods, watching their child sleep or looking at the night sky. I want to make images that share and maybe even trigger those experiences – the times when we see beneath the surface of the world and feel the energies that form and unite us all.

About L.Aviva Diamond

In her solo exhibition “Light Stream,” abstract nature photographer L. Aviva Diamond plunges the viewer into water’s mystical essence. This is art as a form of meditation and reverence, transmitting the spiritual aspects of water. Diamond uses large-scale images to create an immersive experience of the ambiguous, shifting, elemental forces of the cosmos. Her work melds the natural external world with the inner realms of dream, myth and symbol. The boundaries between earth and sky, wave and galaxy, become blurred. Universal becomes cellular; water and light merge into simultaneous creation and destruction – the swirling energies of a shifting universe.

Aviva Diamond began taking photos as a teenager, inspired by the works of Minor White and Paul Klee. She spent many years as a journalist, reporting and shooting for The Miami Herald, winning a local Emmy in St. Louis, and becoming a network correspondent for ABC News. She later established a successful corporate media training business. In 2014, Diamond joined the Los Angeles Art Association and began exhibiting her work. Her art has been included in shows at the Griffin Museum of Photography, the Palm Springs Art Museum, Annenberg Space for Photography, Neutra Institute Gallery, The Center for Fine Art Photography, the Latino Art Museum and various Southern California galleries.

To see more of Aviva Diamond‘s work log onto her website.

Griffin News

Yesterday, we lost the coolest of the cool. Onward, Elsa.

Elsa Dorfman, photographer whose distinctive portraits illuminated her subjects and herself, dies at 83

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