Today’s offering is the last in our series on the creative works of our Griffin 10th Annual Photobook Exhibition. Three artists from across the country telling stories crafted or envisioned. To see the full list of works, or ti purchase any of the books you may have seen in these posts, contact Karen Davis of Davis Orton Gallery.
This is a great time to support artists and the arts community. We are believers that everyone should have access to art and creativity. Start a book collection, hold these objects in your hands. It is in the quiet moments where we can participate in someones creativity, especially through books that we engage our own.
Thomas Whitworth – Constructed Scenarios
The idea for my book came from several years ago when I was pondering ways to visualize questions about the believability of photographs and their presentation of the “truth”. It occurred to me to create my own sets with tiny actors and light them and photograph them depicting scenes that might have happened or could happen and that were narratively suggestive, but not singular stories- the scenes could be interpreted in multiple ways, though they almost always suggested that something “bad” had happened or was going to happen. I additionally shot my own large background photographs from real world views and blended my fake world and real world parts together visually through lighting. So, the work presents real still life objects in a false scenario against reproduced backgrounds of actual landscapes, lit in a studio, digitally recorded and presented as archivally printed transparencies in led backlit frames- multilayers of real and unreal, or true and false. When I created enough of the pieces for a series, I of course, thought of presenting them together as a book- the book form of course, makes it easier to show the work rather than hauling around light boxes, but there is something certainly missing when looking at the images on a page versus lit up on a wall. So, I included a view of several pieces lit up and installed on a wall as the first image in the book.
What would you like us as viewers to take away from your images and text?
To answer the question about what I would want viewers to think about, I will take a few bits from my book’s introduction– The Constructed Scenarios series was created to involve viewers in the act of photographic analysis. The work walks a path between staged setup and photographically real representation. They are intentionally created to engage viewers into their invented narratives- the tableaus are specific enough to be familiar, but not so realistic as to be convincing illusions. These images are both story and still life, photographic reality and theatrical performance, small scale illusion and real world mimic. They present semi-factual information requiring analysis of their elements and an engaged interpretive skill- abilities that are sincerely needed to consider the truth in our vast image and information environments.
And, I will have to add that, given our current world situation, questioning what we are told before accepting it is an even more vital skill.
Whats your next project?
I am currently working on more of the Constructed Scenarios images and I intend to make a second book when I get enough of them done.
Artist Statement
The Constructed Scenarios series is created to involve viewers in the act of photographic analysis. These still lifes are built using HO scale model train figures, vehicles, structures, and lights. The backgrounds are 20″x 30″ prints of actual skies and landscapes. The objects and backgrounds are positioned and lighted to blend the 3D and 2D together. Like cinema, this work utilizes built sets, actors, props, lighting, and backdrops to form a narrative. The tableaus are specific enough to be familiar, but not so realistic as to be convincing illusions. These images are both story and still life, photographic reality and theatrical performance, small scale illusion and real world mimic. They require analysis of their elements and an engaged interpretive skill– abilities that are surely needed to question the truth of photographs in our current image and information environments.
About Thomas Whitworth
MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, MA from California State University, Fullerton, CA, BFA from Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL. Professor of Fine Arts- University of New Orleans, Assistant Professor- Herron School of Art, Indianapolis, IN, Visiting Artist- University of South Florida, Tampa, FL.
One person and group exhibitions, local, state, regional, national, and international over 40 years.
In the collections of the State of Louisiana, Bank of America, Chicago, IL, New Orleans Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, IL, Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry, Miami Beach, FL.
Louisiana Division of the Arts Individual Artist Fellowship 2005 and 1993, Director’s Choice Award- Best Series, Praxis Photographic Arts Center, Minneapolis, MN, Best of Show- Photocentric 2017 Garrison Art Center, Garrison, NY, First Place Juror’s Award- Tampa Biennale, Artists Alliance Gallery, Tampa, FL. Now lives and works in central Florida.
Constructed Scenarios
2019
11 x 14”
32 pages 26 photographs
Hard cover
Printer: Snapfish
$50
Judy Robinson-Cox – Finding Lilliput
What would you like us as viewers to take away from your after seeing your work and words?Artist Statement: For the young at heart, Finding Lilliput, is about a tiny pig named Percy, who is no bigger than a fly. He longs for tiny friends just like him. When he learns about the land of Lilliput, he sets out in a tiny boat to find it. The book, written for children and adults, follows Percy’s adventures in his discovery of Lilliput.
The book grew from a series of photographs that I have been taking for the past 15 years called Lilliputian Landscapes … fantasy landscapes that I create with food, found objects and tiny plastic figures, then photograph with a macro lens. The miniature people transform the scene into a world with a life of its own. Cauliflower becomes a snow-covered hill, and a butternut squash turns into a construction site. I create each scene entirely in front of the camera and do not use Photoshop or any other computer tool to construct the picture.
The photographs have evolved over the years with a new theme or subject each year. They began with a tiny pig and evolved into landscapes made entirely of fruit, vegetables and 3/4” high figures. Then came sushi, Fiestaware, flowers, technology, money, games, artists, bubbles, ice, vintage objects and so on. Finding Lilliput incorporates some of my early work.
Bio: Gloucester, MA based photographer, Judy Robinson-Cox, has been creating miniature photographic tableaux for the past several years. Originally a mixed-media abstract artist and macro photographer, she creates and photographs tiny imaginary worlds to escape from the prejudices, hatred and politics that permeate our culture.
She is represented by the Square Circle Gallery in Rockport, MA; Gallery 53 on Rocky Neck in Gloucester, MA; and is in the permanent collection of the Culinary Arts Museum at Johnson & Wales University.
Finding Lilliput
2018
5.5 x 8.5”
48 pages 27 photographs
Soft cover
Printer: Pritivity.com
$18
Steve Anderson – Faces. Surrealism. book 3
…I am very much influenced by various ‘ painting movements.’ ( Surrealism.Artist Statement: The photographs in this ongoing series, Surruralism explore birth, life, death, … dreamscapes, … family, … animals, … other worlds, in a rural setting. …influenced by painters/ paintings. …various art movements. ( Surrealism. …Pittura Metafisica. ..Symbolism. )
The images have not been manipulated. Everything is as seen through the viewfinder.
Bio: B. 1949. …raised on a small farm, in N. Illinois.
…have lived in Oregon for many years. …photos, in private collections. …exhibitions, in the US, ..Ireland,..& the Netherlands.
Faces, Surruralism: Book 3
2018
Design: Picturia Press
8 x 10”
88 pages 175 photographs
Soft Cover
blurb.com
$59
After seeing my book, I would like readers to feel compassionate and connected – to others on the autism spectrum and to one another. We all have some of the traits of autism, and it is through these commonalities (and hopefully through my work as well) that we can connect. I want people to have a more nuanced view of autism – not solely as a disability but as a gift as well.
These Years Gone By… is a love story told through my grandparents letters from World War II. Shortly after my grandmother’s death in 2008, my mother discovered about 300 letters that my grandparents had written to each other during World War II. They had been kept by my grandmother for over 60 years and inherited by my mother. These letters provided a new insight for my family into the lives of my grandparents during this critical time in world history. From these letters, artifacts and old family photos, I have woven together a narrative that tells the story of this challenging time in their personal history.
This project is more of a curatorial effort through family history with artifacts and old family photos. While this project is narrative driven and embraces my interest in family and world history my other work is slightly different.
My photography has always focused on images of the stuff of daily life ordinarily passed by or kept at the periphery. This approach was named ‘something and nothing’ by Charlotte Cotton in 2009 in her book ‘the photograph as contemporary art.’ These images interrogate the intimate cycles of identity, self-preservation and mortality.
Mike Callaghan’s work focuses on fragmentation, rearrangement and reinterpretation while considering the intimate cycles of identity, preservation and mortality. Mike interrogates the subtlety of gesture and the subtlety of difference in a moment when frameworks of relationships are at once prominently visible and exhaustively hidden.
My father was a superb fine art photographer. In 1999, he and I published a book together about his life’s work. The book, Reflections, consisted of 100 of his photographs and six interviews that I did with him about his aesthetic and his process. Writing the book together was an intimate and extraordinary experience. I learned so much about the life of an artist.
When my Dad died and the sun went out. I felt the night sky open to infinity, icily reaching away from me in emptiness. For two years, nothing could console me for his loss. But then I took up my camera again. Without any conscious purpose, I began to photograph at night. At first, my photos were mostly black, sometimes with a tiny dot of the moon in the far distance. But, in time, more points of light crept in. Increasingly, I became more interested in finding light than in recording darkness. The dark of night became a space with the potential for illumination, for complexity, for life and liveliness, even for warmth.
What was the inspiration for the book project?
Artist Statement As a child I spent many hours roaming the maze of rooms in my father’s furniture store. The shapes that filled these make-believe spaces, 1960’s reproductions of ‘Early American’ furniture became imprinted in my consciousness. Without realizing it I committed these shapes to memory.
