STILL Photography December 12, 2019 – June 14, 2020 Selections from the JSMA Permanent Collection Thom Sempere JSMA Associate Curator of Photography PHOTOGRAPHYStill Noun Deep silence and calm; stillness. The still of the night. An ordinary static photograph, especially a single shot from a movie. A work of art depicting mostly inanimate subject matter, typically commonplace objects: still-life. Verb Still Make or become still. She raised her hand, stilling their protests. Adverb Up to and including the present or the time mentioned. Even though it is digital, it is still photography. Adjective Not moving or making a sound. Her voice carried on the still air. Through years of study and use, we learn the nuanced nature of language, but have less formal training when considering how to read photographs. We might understand a single word differently based on whether it is spoken or written. Often, a definition includes multiple meanings. Still may be employed as a noun, verb, adverb or an adjective. There are fewer collective ‘rules’ to apply when viewing photographs. Images may be used in a myriad of ways. Mute, and often caption-less, pictures are prone to misconstrued readings. What did their makers wish for us to know about their worlds? As viewers, we might consider the intent of the photographer and the context of the picture’s making to try to interpret its meaning. Our interactions with and responses to images play an important role in the cycle of understanding. Yet, photographs say much when left on their own. STILL Photography features works from the museum’s permanent collection. First, wander through these pictures and simply look. Consider each individually, and then allow them to mingle and converse amongst each other. Try to apply different notions of still and see what comes in response. When reading photographs, sometimes the clarity of intended meaning matters. Just as often, a flexibility of interpretation is welcomed. We invite you to learn more about the works on view by listening to insights from Thom Sempere, associate curator of photography, through Guide by Cell. Minor White Minor White was an influential photographer, educator, critic and theoretician. Born in Minneapolis, in 1938, White moved to Portland, Oregon and began his career by first joining the Oregon Camera Club, then taking on assignments from the Federal Works Progress Administration and exhibiting at the Portland Art Museum. He served in the Army during WWII and spent two years studying aesthetics and art history at Columbia University and later followed aspects of Zen philosophy. He became involved with a circle of photographers including, Edward Weston, Ansel Adams and Alfred Stieglitz all who had major influence on his life’s work. Through those connections White developed a distinctive style that often gave mystical interpretations to his work emphasizing the spiritual possibilities of viewing images often placed in sequences or series. In 1953 he moved to Rochester, New York and worked as a curator at George Eastman House, edited their magazine Image and taught at the Rochester Institute of Technology. The picture here was made on a snowy day in Rochester, and is emblematic of White’s mature style of art making. Alfred Stieglitz (whose portrait by Imogen Cunningham is seem on the opposite wall) had introduced the concept that a photograph is somehow uniQuely positioned to provoke many distinct readings depending on how a viewer may be willing to receive its message. This distilled concept became know as an EQuivalent. In White’s words “when a photograph functions as an equivalent, the photograph is at once a record of something in front of the camera and simultaneously a spontaneous symbol”- akin to a metaphor. Now, returning to the print, focus your attention and see that first, the image is a document of a lovely aesthetic impression, but allowing a different state of mind perhaps the forms, shapes and tones taken more internally and symbolically may be leveraged for a different and very individual interpretation Guide by Cell 99# Dan Powell Dan Powell is an Associate Professor Emeritus of Art at the University of Oregon. During a European summer sojourn he found himself on the deck of a ferryboat traversing the Adriatic Sea. In a recent conversation when pressed to describe the experience of making this photograph he paused when asked of its meaning and offered up the word liminal- that rather rare state where something occupies a position on both sides of a boundary or threshold. We see within the frame a swipe of tone from light to dark. A form emerges and simultaneously recedes and through that yin/yang existence a metaphor can be conjured up with implications of beginnings and endings, or the implying the very transition of life and death itself. Aaron Siskind Aaron Siskind was an influential photographer and educator who is best known for his innovative work creating abstract images. In the early 1940s he began photographing patterns and textures and isolated elements of mundane objects. Removing himself from a documentary impulse, he developed his approach as an attempt to express his own state of mind in photography----rather than simply to record subject matter. In a 1945 article Drama of Objects he said: … we see in terms of our education. We look at the world and see what we believe is there. What we have been conditioned to expect. And indeed it is socially useful that we agree on the function of objects. But as photographers, we must learn to relax our beliefs. Move on objects with your eyes straight on… to the left…around on the right. Watch them grow large as you approach, group and regroup themselves as you shift your position. Relationships gradually emerge, and sometimes assert themselves with finality. ….And that’s your picture Sally Mann Sally Mann, one of America’s most distinctive photographers was born and raised on a family farm in Rockbridge County, Virginia. She then married, raised 3 children and continues to reside on that rural family plot with a slow paced river always floating by. Mann’s work always seems to turn to things personal- that which cannot be seen, but only felt. And she has written poignantly of her attachment to place. I have loved Rockbridge County, Virginia, surely since the moment my birth- bleary eyes caught sight of it, Living in the South means being both nourished and wounded by the experience. To identify a person as a Southerner is always to suggest not only that her history is inescapable and profoundly formative, but that it is also imperishably present. Southerners live at the nexus between myth and reality where that peculiar amalgam of sorrow, humility, honor, loyalty, graciousness and renegade defiance plays out against a backdrop of profligate physical beauty. So when we see Mann’s work…or anyone else’s for that matter realize that the subject of a photograph may be easily recognizable but the content or emotional core is often more hidden and may require a wider reading of an artist’s life to reveal it’s true identity. Claire Trotter Claire Trotter was a well-known artist from the Pacific Northwest and resided for many years here in Eugene. While her work was published extensively in journals devoted to the arts, what truly mattered to Trotter was the now less traveled path of producing gelatin silver prints by hand. Even though photography was often labeled a mechanical medium, the truth is that with all the possible variables available each hand-processed print made is still quite unique. In introductory thoughts from one of her earlier exhibitions she said: To be sensitive to the beauty that is all around us enhances the quality of our lives. In the interplay between the form and moods awakened in the sensitive viewer, a response is evoked in which the viewer becomes the co-creator. Guide by Cell 100# Imogen Cunningham A distinct and beloved character, Imogen Cunningham was one of America’s most admired photographic artists with a career spanning more than 75 years, nearly half the history of photography itself. Born in Portland in 1883, she was named after the heroine in Shakespeare's play Cymbeline. Always a standout in the community, she was highly individualistic and continuously challenged traditional thought. Her early creative output embraced a romantic pictorialist style where soft focus lenses and metaphoric impulses were fore fronted. But by 1934, the date of this marvelous portrait, with the unfolding of a new Modernist century, her aesthetic compass had shifted dramatically. Also in 1934, Cunningham and fellow photographers Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, Willard Van Dyke and others formed a loosely knit group they coined f/64. The name, taken from the lens opening that produces the sharpest picture on a view camera signified the group’s move away from imprecise images toward a more straightforward approach of the new Modernist period where clarity and precision- basic elements of the photographic were embraced. Her portraits ranged from cool, formal considerations to personal explorations revealing aspects of a sitter’s personality and she captured some of the most influential personages of her age: Herbert Hoover, Upton Sinclair, Gertrude Stein, Martha Graham, Cary Grant and a host of others. This portrait of Alfred Stieglitz was made in his gallery in New York when he was 70 and nearing the end of a remarkable 50-year career. He was an accomplished photographer and promoter of Modern art who introduced many avant-garde European artists to the U.S. including the first exhibitions by artists such as Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso. Stieglitz fought tirelessly to elevate the medium of photography from a tool of description to an expressive individual form as art.