Silver and Water: An Interview with Metabolic Studio's Optics Division

"The Owens Valley became the darkroom from which emerged this image of Los Angeles."

Optics Division’s Lauren Bon, Tristan Duke, and Richard Nielsen discuss the origins and scope of their work together — an ongoing engagement that renders the relationship between Los Angeles and the Owens Valley through the process of photography.

Richard Nielsen On my first trip to the Owens Valley with Lauren, we talked about the lakebed on many levels — as being something that holds something, something buried, a scar upon Los Angeles. Lauren described the possibilities for using optics as

1 a way of visualizing a memory of the space. The Optics Division was pre- imagined at this point, ten or so years ago.

Tristan Duke In March 2010, I had come out to California from Boulder because I heard that these people were going to be trying to create a film from scratch at the “Three Day Shootout.” There was this moment, you know, sitting in the silos with Rich and Lauren, talking about ideas like the lakebed as literally being this photochemical agent.

RN We’ve been working from that conversation ever since.

TD The Liminal Camera has taken on a life of its own and has gotten a lot of attention. But the original project that the Optics Division is formed around is a vision that Lauren had already started to set out with the “Three Day Shootout” and the photography of the landscape made entirely out of the landscape. And not just any landscape. Specifically, the dry lakebed in the Owens Valley.

Lauren Bon Because of the region’s relationship to the history of photography, because of the silver mining that went on right above the Owens Valley.

RN And we had already worked with the silver mine for a long time. We were very aware of the chemistry of the lake.

LB And we had held early discussions and collaborations with Robert Schaller of the Handmade Film Institute and the Echo Park Film Center, both of which make handmade, hand-processed film.

TD But I would also say that beyond the region’s literal history or its relationship with photography, there is also a conceptual idea that we started discussing early on, as Rich and Lauren are alluding to. We were thinking of the relationship between, on the one hand, the voided landscape of the Owens Valley and the lack of water in the Owens Valley and, on the other hand, the budding metropolis of LA and its Hollywood film industry. The latter grew because of the siphoning of water and silver from the Owens Valley. We started applying that conceptual framework to a photographic lens and realizing that the Owens Valley becomes like a “negative” to the “positive” that is LA. Later in our process, the Owens Valley became the darkroom from which emerged this image of Los Angeles.

2 LB Related to this, the Liminal Camera comes from the LA watershed. If the Owens dry lakebed is the negative of Los Angeles, then the port of Long Beach can also be seen as the point at which the watershed — drained from the Owens Lake — leaves the land body and enters the ocean. Shipping containers encrust the port of Long Beach, creating a seashore veritably barnacled. The Liminal Camera is made from the watershed’s primary “found object,” a standard shipping container.

Liminal Camera on the Owens dry lakebed.

LADWP Rehydration Project at Owens Dry Lake, 2011.

3 TD The Owens Lake used to be the largest port in Southern California — port Swansea.

LB It was where the silver from the silver mines was loaded on to trains to go back east.

RN There is silver in the lake, too.

LB Pulverized by time and leeching off the mountains when it rains to end up in the dry lakebed.

It’s where the idea originated that the Optics Division would make every aspect of photography ourselves, including slow-mining and extracting silver to be used as photographic silver salts. And that there’s something about the manufacturing of everything that is part of the political narrative of American exceptionalism, something that a lot of the people who find themselves living in the Owens Valley regret losing.

The Owens dry lake is held in trust for the people of the State of California. In the years that I’ve been engaged in the Owens Valley, practicing the kind of civics of trying to help nudge some rational reasoning into play, it has showed me two things. One, that the perception – or the “optics” – of the lake held by the power structure is one-hundred-percent negative and a situation of damage limitation. From the State of California's focal length on the dry lakebed is just, “Try to stay out of the news, avoid the public, avoid publicity.” We know that photography can change the optics of the narrative of place. The Optics Division has recognized that the dry lakebed, the camera, and the prints operate as devices of wonder that open people's ability to listen to a narrative, or to create a different frame on an old story that they haven’t been exposed to before.

RN Owens Valley struggles with the ability to be recognized for its beauty. We certainly find beauty there. The other component is the state regulation that still defines the lake as a lake and a body of water and thus allowing people to use it for recreation. Despite everything, the lake is actually open to the citizens of California and to the world.

LB And it's open to us. We're able to go under cover of darkness with our giant camera.

4 TD And exercise our right.

RN We're recreating.

LB We see what we do as political action, as an exercise of our citizens’ rights. LA DWP workers go by in their trucks and see us but they don’t stop us.

TD It's the same as if we were out on our yacht, just boating. We had to invent new recreational activities for this dry lake bed.

LB The photographs are the result of the performance of being there, doing what we do there — those photographic prints are in one sense a souvenir. Those rips and tears on the paper are an index of that dry lakebed.

RN Absolutely. I think a lot of what the studio does is performative.

TD Or, if not a performance, an artist action. In some cases, there is no audience; when we're out there, it's just us and the stars.

LB It is definitely our happy place. In some senses, we are recreating in the same way that people do when they go to the seaside.

RN I also think that extends to when we're on the road with the camera, too — when the Liminal Camera becomes an extension of the studio, a satellite for the studio.

LB But also an extension of the Owens Lake. We play the sounds that we capture in the Owens Valley when the Liminal Camera travels.

RN We generally have that connection — that tether — to our place during this bigger journey and adventure.

TD Very often I am asked by people, once they encounter the Optics Division, “What’s the advantage of having a giant camera or developing prints in the lakebed?” We are used to thinking of photography within a model of progress.

5 Especially in the field of photography, people expect for you to say, “Well, this giant camera has amazing resolution and it captures details that are beyond anything that digital can do,” or something like that. That’s precisely not the point of the Liminal Camera. It's about the process and how we get there. We can all go inside the camera, share that same view in ways that are impossible with any image-capture device other than a camera obscura.

RN Being inside the camera, you can physically bear witness together. When we take the Liminal Camera on the road, it's very much in the tradition of the traveling scientist from the nineteenth century — an old-fashioned device of wonder, a populist parade object. People really feel that they’re being given something special.

Liminal Camera at the de Young Museum, San Francisco, 2013.

TD There’s something very powerful about the camera being hidden in plain sight, in the sense that we don’t go out of our way to publicize where the camera will be or that some performative action is going to take place.

We show up and do it. I think it makes the discovery that much more inspiring of wonder for the people who do happen by.

6 LB And because there is nostalgia connected to old-fashioned cameras. People trust you more if you have an analog camera. It works on an emotional level as an icebreaker and sets up a situation where we can meet people and see where it goes from there. We can set up a situation for portrait taking and it really disarms people to decide for themselves that they would like to participate and be photographed.

RN There’s a kind of free-form quality to that because you don’t know where the community will go with the encounter.

LB I think it also speaks of another aspect of the camera, which is something that we'd been looking at since we first started spending time in Rochester with the George Eastman Museum team. The early traveling photographers would take off with the camera on their backs, document as they went, and sometimes develop salted images with local paper. The whole idea of being truly open to what you’re going to learn and what you’re going to see is reflected in that aspect of the history of photography.

RN Some of the greatest landscape photographers of all time came to California and photographed in and around the Owens Valley. You can’t help but feel part of this lineage.

We have now built a tent camera that is packed and carried on mules up into the very mountains that the early photographers traversed. We use the forest as our darkroom and the river as our water source. The camera memorizes everything that it sees. This idea also animates the camera we have made inside one of the silos at the edge of the Owens dry lakebed, and which serves as a witness to the lake. It's always there, it's always watching.

TD The concept of bearing witness is something that we often talk about together. For some, the camera is like a detached eye or a cold, mechanical device. But the cameras that we make are, in a sense, compassionate, or at least a humane version of the camera. The other side of this is that within Lauren’s studio there is no judgment upon what unfolds. We're there to witness, we're not on one side or the other.

RN Being part of the Optics Division at Metabolic Studio has taught me an awful lot about being in the world as an artist and working with people — whether in a group setting with other artists or working with a larger community that’s radically different from the art world. The studio shapes the way that I think about what we're doing. And it extends from a creative methodology to a place to explore what a camera is truly capable of doing.

7 Generated automatically on September 28, 2021 from https://www.metabolicstudio.org/86. Metabolic Studio supports living systems.

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