The Times Quotidian

The Photography of Alison Rosstier
by Lorraine Anne Davis

Time is deceptive. It is always hiding something. The present is so fleeting that only the past and future may be comprehended. The nano-second of immediate event perception, the “specious present” is understood only in reflection. Every moment of consciousness is spent processing what has just past while constantly anticipating the future. The brain must contextualize each thought to make sense of the world, time-traveling relentlessly in an information-saturated world that threatens to overwhelm  the ceaseless internal dialogue that defines us to ourselves.

“Time isn’t like the other senses. Sight, smell, touch, taste, and hearing are relatively easy to isolate in the brain. They have discrete functions that rarely overlap: it’s hard to describe the taste of a sound, the color of a small, or the scent of a feeling. (Unless of course, you have synsthesia…) ‘Brain-time’, is intrinsically subjective”, states Houston Neuroscientist David Eagleman, in the April 25^th issue of the New Yorker, “The Possibilian” by Burkhard Bilger.

Barnet Bar-Gas, exact expiration date unknown,  c. 1920’s, processed 2007

Pianists scan the score they are playing approximately two bars ahead, anticipating the requirements of the measures to come, while their hands play what their eyes have already read and their ears listen to what has just been played; all the while reflecting on what was just heard and adjusting their fingering to create the next musical passage; concurrently reading the future while interpreting the past.

In conversation, we must gather all the words of each sentence into our short-term memory in order to make sense of what we are hearing. We can infer (from the history of personal experience) content as we listen, but any unexpected deviation will re-order what has just past so that the intended meaning is passed from the speaker to the listener. Additionally, in order to avoid aural overload and to absorb what is relevant, much of what we hear is filtered out as ‘white noise’. Hence each person’s recall of the conversation is purely subjective, the memory filters allowing only what is necessary for comprehension.

Making sense of the visual world is no less daunting. From the moment we open our eyes, we are assailed by imagery. The ‘visual clutter’ of our everyday world is reduced by our ability to zoom in, focus and contextualize the chaos which bombards our eyes, so that we can get the information that is pertinent to our immediate needs.

Photography is the one media that overtly attempts to arrest time. The fastest shutter speed currently available on a Digital SLR is 1/16000. But photographers often try to blur time with long exposures such as Mark Klett’s night-sky images or the images of Hiroshi Sugimoto of open-shutter exposures of movie theater screens or his candle-light pieces, In the Praise of Shadow.

At the opposite pole are the recognizable “decisive moments” of Cartier-Bresson, or the fictional instants of diCorcia’s elaborate set-ups or Tina Barney’s familial scenes caught in mid-motion or Larry Fink’s subjects trapped unawares in his flash or the “fragmented narratives” of Todd Hido. These are all examples of slices of life, stopped in time, so that the viewer can reflect and evaluate their subjective experiences with the subjective view of the photographer.

The majority of photographs made in the world fall into the above two categories: stop time or stretch time. When one visits the international art fairs such as Paris Photo or AIPAD in New York, one wanders from booth to booth, looking at isolated slices of time, delineated by their square or rectangular formats and bound by frames. The frames serve to lessen the phenomena identified as “visual crowding”. The predicament with displays in art fairs, and museums for that matter, is how to prevent visual over-load. One goes to a museum and after looking at twenty or so pieces, the work begins to blur, particularly if the exhibition is ‘themed’. The differences between the works lessen, and their similarities begin to merge. Like the invisible gorilla experiments, there is only so much the brain can process at a time and so begins to delegate pictures into a background of visual white noise.

At the most recent AIPAD exhibition, the work of Alison Rossiter resisted all unintentional attempts to be filtered out. At the fair, Rossiter was represented by two galleries: Stephen Bulger, Toronto, and Yossi Milo, New York. Her work was not just visually different (it was), it was arresting on account of its escape from the two basic time categories of stopping or alternately blurring time. Her work carries and aura of stillness, yet the images are all about the effect of time, so the contradiction is riveting.

Left: Origin of Species – Charles Darwin, 2004
Right: Principia – Isaac Newton, 2004

Rossiter, a photographer since the 1970s, first began her experiments with camera-less images in 1984 however, in 1997 she began to seriously concentrate on the photogram with her book series. The series was inspired in part by Louise Lawler, the conceptualist artist who would show films, with only the soundtrack, and a black screen, or the opposite; make photograms of vinyl records with the name of the album as the title. Each album-photogram looked virtually the same; however the implied content of the object was both dense and diverse. Rossiter, in her book-photograms stands the book on the photographic paper and exposes it to light, capturing the shadow as light. She then assigns the title of the book to the image: Principia – Issac Newton or The Origin of Species – Charles Darwin. These two books written in 1687 and 1859 respectively, radically altered the world view. In Rossiter’s photograms, they are rendered silent (like Lawler’s record albums), yet we know from the titles, the profound influence upon mankind that they hold. The images form an interesting dichotomy: illumination defined by shadow; elucidation defined by obscurity. But Rossiter has admitted, “It’s hard to be clever” when coming up with subject matter for photograms, a difficulty Adam Fuss seems to have mastered.

Eadweard Muybridge, Ruth Bucking, 2003

Extending her ‘straight’ photograms, she began sketching with light wands, taking inspiration from her interest in horses. By using masked pen-lights she began her Dark-Horse and Light-Horse series. The images are made by “drawing” on the paper with various masked pen lights. She learned that if she held the light very close to the paper, she could make relatively precise lines. When she pulled the pen light away from the paper, the line would form a halo of varying shades of grey. The resulting images are reminiscent of the Paleolithic cave drawings at Lascaux and titled: Dark Horse, Buck, 2006 or Work Horse at Rest, 2004.

In 2003, Rossiter volunteered at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the Sherman Fairchild Center for Works on Paper and Photograph Conservation, under Nora Kennedy. Kennedy, along with Peter Mustardo, founded The Better Image, in Milford, New Jersey. (Rossiter now works at The Better Image as a conservation assistant.)  Her interest in photographic conservation served as the gateway to her heightened appreciation of photographic materials, particularly expired black and white papers and their instability as a unpredictable yet pliable medium to work with.

In 2007, looking on the internet for 5×7 film for a camera she had, she purchased the contents of a darkroom on EBay. The seller included an unopened box of paper which Rossiter tested for fogging and was surprised by what came up in the developer tray. The paper had degraded from the effects of time and the environment, and those effects, when developed, appeared as a Mark Tobey rubbing, or a Cy Twombly-ist like canvas. Most delightful was her discovery of a photographer’s finger print who had touched the Kodak Velox F3 that carried an expiration date of May 1941. Inspired by the latent images, she began purchasing expired, fiber-based paper whenever she could find it and now owns a stock of about 1000 papers. The oldest is Eastman Kodak Dekko which expired January 1, 1900.

Kodak Velox F3, expiration May 1941, processed 2007

These camera-less images from her ‘Lament’ series, aptly named for the obsolescence of photographic materials, are unique, not only in the world of art-photography but as one-of-a-kind objects as well. Rossiter coaxes the papers to reveal their latent degradation which results is an array of subtle colors; from flushes of purple-grays to rainbow edged patinas. “I hadn’t seen that tonality in my negatives.” she remarked in wonderment. If she finds that the paper has been completely exposed to light, (developing out black) she selectively dips edges in the developer or pools the developer to make solid abstract forms. The density of the high-content silver papers produces inky blacks that appear depthless and recall the abstract expressionists Robert Motherwell and Franz Klein. An expansion of Rossiter’s Lament Series is her photograms of expired sheet film. Laying a sheet of film on photo paper, she exposes the paper, and develops it. These ‘found’ rectangles, replete with their notch codes, tend to float off the paper, lending a two dimensional effect to the piece, evoking Rothko’s floating squares, sans color.

Nepera Carbon Velox, expiration May 1906, processed 2008

The multi-layered aspect of Rossiter’s work is mesmeric. First, there is the time-element: the work is a throw-back to Herschel and Talbot’s early experiments in light-sensitive material. There is the excitement of discovery of alteration, like an archeologist uncovering an extinct technology; highlighted in Rossiter’s titles: Defender, Carbon Argo, expiration August 1908, processed 2009, or Barnet Bar-Gas, exact expiration date unknown, c. 1920’s, processed 2007.

The images reveal the beauty of science and technology, tied inextricably to the relentless progression of nature working in the dark: light-sensitive materials responding to an environment outside of what they were intended for. The images refuse to be defined by what we identify as a ‘photograph’; the capture of an instant; yet they mark the inexorable march of time. Her photograms of books capture antique tomes that continue to influence the contemporary world, while her light-drawings of horses are ancient cave drawings produced in the present.

Left: Fuiji Gaslight, expiration c. 1920’s, processed 2009
Right: Kodak Velvet Velox, expiration 1918, porocessed 2009

From the aesthetic point of view, one is reminded of the abstract expressionists. As Rothko once said, “We favor the simple expression of the complex thought…”  The effect of Rossiter’s work is the same as if one was wandering around the classical galleries of the MET and then walked into the modernist gallery. The effect is immediate. We must come up with a different set of viewing criteria as the old ones are no longer applicable.

Ultimately, Rossiter’s work combines both Eagleman’s theory of “brain-time” with “Newtonian time”, creating works whose silence stands out from the white noise of narrative photography. As Rothko once said of his own paintings, “their silence is so accurate”.

Expanded ‘Spotlight’ from B&W COLOR – Ross Periodicals: Issue 84

Chris McCaw’s Sunburn Series
by Lorraine Davis

Every ancient culture has a sun legend: Neolithic petroglyphs depict solar barges carrying the sun across the sky while the Egyptian, Greek, Vedic, Nordic, Chinese, Japanese, North and South American Indian cultures had  sun deities and sun myths, representing the sun as a source of both life and death.

Modern man knows that our sun, a yellow dwarf star, is about five billion years old. It is 92.5 million miles away and travelling at 186 thousand miles per second , its light takes approximately 8.2 minutes to reach earth. The sun’s photosphere -from the Greek word for light=photo and sphaira=ball, is a constant fusion of hydrogen and helium, which produces our sunlight. Please click on the image to enlarge and for all artwork details.

Sunburned GSP #166 (Mojave/Winter solstice full day), 2007

Sunburn #1 (Utah/sunrise), 2003. Originally titled- Sunrise, 2003

The first photograph of the sun is credited to the French physicists Louis Fizeau and Leon Foucault who made fascinating daguerreotypes of the sun in April of 1845. Warren de la Rue developed the first heliograph (different from the Niepce heliograph), a telescope fitted with a specially designed focal plane shutter that allowed him to photograph the sun using the wet-collodion glass negative process.

The sun is enveloped in a chromosphere- literally “color-ball”- of the red H-alpha spectral line of hydrogen which can only be seen through a special H-alpha filter or with the naked eye during a total solar eclipse.  In 1860 La Rue travelled to Spain and photographed, for the first time, a full solar eclipse, for which he later received a gold medal from the Royal astronomical Society. His daguerreotype recorded the first evidence of the sun’s chromosphere. Since that time, eclipse chasers have travelled the world to photograph full solar eclipses.

Photography means to draw with light; particularly sunlight, and nowhere, since the gentlemen scientist photographers of the 19^th century, is drawing with sunlight more literally taken than in the work of Chris McCaw. McCaw’s Sunburn Series are solarized heliographs..or sun-burned pictures.

Sunburned GSP#317 (Pacific Ocean), 2009

In 2003, when photographing star tracks, McCaw overslept and woke up to a smoking camera caused by the sun burning a hole into the film. Like his 19^th century predecessors whose endless curiosity and creative experiments led to the development of photography, McCaw went back to his darkroom with the idea that he might actually have an image, only to discover that the sheet film had literally solarized; reversing negative to positive. When he developed the film, he found that it was completely over exposed and negative was black, with a hole burnt into it. McCaw, instead of thinking of it as a failure, became fascinated. He began to experiment and eventually realized that he could expose gelatin-silver, fiber-based, photographic paper instead of film and capture a reversed image of the landscape beneath the track of the sun. The extreme over exposure solarizes the paper and the sun, pinpointed through the lens, burns itself into in the paper. The gelatin layer in the paper acts as a fire retardant and prevents the paper from combusting entirely inside the film holder.

True solarization (sometimes referred to as classic or reversal solarization) is not to be confused with the Sabatier Effect – the reversal of a portion of a photographic image resulting from prolonged exposure to an extremely bright light. Solarization was first noted in overexposed daguerreotypes. In contemporary gelatin-silver, fiber based papers,  solarization reversal is a result of the release of bromide ions caused by very intense development in the area of overexposure. The exposure necessary to produce true solarization is in the range of 1,000 to10,000 times used to produce total black in the negative, and in contemporary practice it is a rare phenomenon.

McCaw found that he was able to modify the development of the exposed paper with chemical restrainers which allowed him to develop and fix the image before the extreme over exposure made the paper go completely black. This produced a solarized landscape under a tracked-image sun that oft-times burned itself into the paper. Through endless and time consuming experimentation, McCaw discovered that only vintage photographic papers had enough silver to reverse and withstand the intense burning.

To produce these one-of-a-kind images, McCaw must find old boxes of paper and then experiment with each box until he discovers its optimum development time. McCaw states, “The gelatin in the paper gets cooked and leaves wonderful colors of orange and red, with ash that ranges from a glossy black to an iridescent metallic surface. Not only is the resulting image a representation of the subject photographed, but part of the subject (the sun) has become an active participant in the printmaking….every year I have further advanced this method.  Learning about military aerial reconnaissance camera optics and pretty much the entire history of gelatin silver enlarging papers since the late 1960’s, I now have bettered the means to execute the ideas in my head. Currently I am working out ideas ranging from large 30”x40” images, mosaics of paper, (documenting) solar locomotion.”

Sunburned GSP#323 (Santa Cruz Mtns/expand & contract), 2009

McCaw’s work is technologically fascinating; but it is the mythic implications of the subject matter that make the work stand out. From the advent of mankind, the travels of the sun marking the seasons, gave rise to monumental calandars such as Stonehenge and Chaco Canyon, and in contemporary culture –Turell’s Rodan Crater.

Archeoastonomers study astronomical observations as recorded by ancient cultures including celestial lore, mythology, and the evidence left behind by now extinct civilizations. The Great Pyramid at Giza, the Mayan Palace of the Governor at Uxmal in the Yucatan, numerous lithic monuments throughout the British Isles and Northeast America, were all constructed to mark the path of the sun in order to subscribe the seasons. Archeoastronomy and ethnoastronomy both investigate man’s interaction with the cosmos.

According to ISSAC, the International Society for Archaeoastronomy and Astronomy in Culture, “archaeoastronomy has expanded to include the interrelated interests in ancient and native calendar systems, concepts of time and space, mathematics, counting systems and geometry, surveying and navigational techniques as well as geomancy and the origins of urban planning.”

The marking of the passing of time, by the merciless sun god, is anachronistic. No one has sun-dials in their garden anymore, much less moon-dials. We keep our contact with the sun to a minimum, and notice the moon only in passing when it is full.

Mc Caws images, with their minimalist modernism, evoke the time between what we were, and what we are now, and how fascinated, yet disconnected we are, to the single star, by which we live and will one day die.

Sunburned GSP#123 (Tahoe/expanding), 2007

Jean-Pascal Imsand: Photographer, Swiss, (1960-1994)
by Lorraine Anne Davis

Lorraine Anne Davis is a curator-appraiser of fine art photography and a board member of the Fondation Jean-Pascal Imsand. Her lecture, The Famous, The Infamous and the Anonymous, A History of Portraiture in Photography will be given at the Center for Creative Photography in Tuscon, February 4, 2011 to accompany the CCP exhibition FACE TO FACE: 150 Years of Photographic Portraiture

Gifted with exceptional visual talents, Jean-Pascal Imsand rose to prominence in the European world of fineart photography, only to end his own life at the age of 34. He left behind a legacy that has continued to grow making this master photographer—with his oeuvre of poignant documentary work and thought-provoking surrealist montages—a significant contributor t the visual culture of his native Switzerland.

Born in the French speaking city of Lausanne, Switzerland,in 1960, Jean-Pascal Imsand displayed a potent visual gift from a young age, spending endless hours with pencil and paper, sketching and drawing, sometimes from photographs—exposed to the photographic image early on by his father who was a commercial photographer. Jean-Pascal later recalled how as a boy he always had to be mindful of the prints that were laid out to dry throughout the house. After secondary school, Imsand attended the Kunstgewerbeschule in Basel, where he studied lithography, etching and graphic design. In the early 1980s, at the Atelier Pietro Sarto in the town of Saint-Prex, in the Canton of Vaud, he assisted Jon Goodman, who was at the Atelier printing dustgrained photogravures for the portfolio Edward Steichen: The Early Years,1900 –1927, as well as a number of Paul Strand images for the Aperture Foundation.

Although the Atelier did not teach photography, the printers often produced photo-based etchings and lithographs, and it seemed natural for Imsand to eventually move from drawing to printmaking to photography. Initially he hesitated to take up photography, partly because of the idea of working in his father’s shadow. But the young man’s visual perception was already exceptionally well developed, as evidenced by his drawings and etchings, and this vision would certainly translate perfectly into the photographic medium. Consequently, he was encouraged to pursue photography by two of his mentors, Charles Henri Favrod, the founding director of the Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne—Switzerland’s first photography museum—and Edmond Quinche, his lithography teacher at Atelier Pietro Sarto. Imsand’s intuitive understanding of the serendipitous nature of hand-inked printing plates, coupled with his insistence on fulfilling his own particular artistic vision, served him well when he moved from the Atelier to the darkroom. Already a master at one craft, he soon became a master of another, rendering in silver what he had previously done in ink.

By 1985, Imsand was a full-time photographer, actively exhibiting in galleries and museums and working on commercial assignments. Illustrative of his unusually rapid development, in 1988 he won the coveted Grand Prix Européen de la Photographie at Arles—the top award in Europe for fine art photography. Unlike most other photographers who work both in fine art and commercial photography, with Imsand there was never a distinction between the two branches. Dieter Bachmann, the editor of du —Switzerland’s famous cultural magazine—recalled that “Jean-Pascal was one of the countless photographers to call at the offices…[his photographs] instantly stood out among the conventional and fashionable work we saw everyday.“ Over time, an intense relationship developed between the magazine and the photographer, “…a friendship of such deep mutual respect that over the next six years five issues would bear the stamp of Jean-Pascal’s photographs.“

[View with PicLens]

In 1986, after finishing a commercial assignment in a theatre, Imsand returned to his darkroom to develop the film and make contact sheets. While checking his negatives, he suddenly became aware of the face of a woman—he immediately recognized her as someone unique. Although he had never met Sabina Scullari, she soon became his muse and within one year they were married. Using his wife as a model in his fine art work as well as in his commercial assignments, he made thousands of photographs of her, culminating in four pictorial essays published between 1990 and 1992 and a number of sensitively sequenced personal albums.

In 1989, Imsand and Sabina moved from Lausanne to Zürich—Switzerland’scenter for both business and culture—where commercial work and exhibition opportunities were more readily available to him.

Although achieving a definite measure of fame and success as a photographer during his lifetime, Imsand’s most lasting legacy is undoubtedly his unique ability to expose to the viewer inner visions that, when manifested into physical photographic prints, seem to reflect our own, often hard-to-express throughts and feelings. He had the uncanny ability to make photographs that consistently evoked emotional responses without using obvious visual cues. Instead he used everyday views that imperceptively took on deeper meanings: a wind-blown curtain, railway tracks seen through a rain splattered window, an empty rail station….

Imsand was a master in the darkroom, where his skills exquisitely expressed his artistic and technical virtuosity. In the tradition of classic printmaking, he pushed and pulled the darks and the highlights, revealing or, in turn, obscuring elements to achieve his vision. Perhaps his most popular images were his montages, which often had political content, showing in surrealistic, dream-like scenes a future that might be: the Alps engulfed by ocean waves; Manhattan’s Flat Iron Building tilted like a forgotten headstone, sinking into the sea; escalators moving through clouds…. The montages were made using individual negatives exposed in succession. Working from a single enlarger, he did not edition his prints and if he made more than one print, each was a variation on the theme, which of course resulted in every print being unique.

As demonstrated by the tragic circumstances of his premature death, Imsand knew all too well the effects of pain. He knew that emotional torment could tear the soul open, uncovering deep-seated truths. He used this understanding when he photographed the drug abusers of the Letten. From the early 1980s, the city leaders of Zürich had turned a blind eye to the hard-drug users congregating in a small park behind the Swiss National Museum. Eventually the park became a free-for-all, attracting dealers and addicts from all over Europe. It became infamously known as Needle Park. In 1992, there was a crackdown and the police went in with tear-gas. But the addicts just moved, finding another haven—the Letten—an area surrounding an abandoned train station facing the Limmat River. In one of his most profound series, Imsand turned his focus on this dark corner of the city—not as a voyeur, but as someone with deep empathy for the lost souls that were drawn to it. His images of the Letten were not just pictures of a dark period in Zürich’s recent history—they were both emotionally revealing and strongly documentary, showing all-too-clearly the government’s abandonment of its difficult children and puncturing the Swiss sense of perfection by revealing the failure of the citizens who refused to recognize the problem until it was too late.

[View with PicLens]

For a viewer looking at Imsand’s collected works it becomes clear that one of his recurring themes was trains and tracks. Perhaps nowhere as prevalent in Europe as in Switzerland are the screeching of brakes, the incessant rumble of wheels over tracks, the echoes of announcements of arrivals and departures, the constant ebb and flow of masses of bodies running to and fro—in Imsand’s mind all this seems to have been a representation of the fast-paced, relentless passage of life itself. It is more than merely poignant that when he decided to end his life, he chose to do so by throwing himself in front of a moving train.

Imsand’s death was a tragedy to those who were left in the wake of his absence. It is profoundly sad to lose a husband, a friend—an artist who was yet to reach the peak of his ability. Ultimately, Imsand’s widow and his close friends have come to accept that it was his choice to make. As painful as it was for Sabina, she knew that life for Jean-Pascal had become much too intense. Always sensitive, he had become hyper-sensitive. He heard everything, felt everything. He did, for a short time, take medication, but could not accept the dullness and lack of depth the drugs imposed upon him. He had seen such ghosts in the Letten and feared losing his own creative drive.

Sabina recalled to the author: “Jean-Pascal knew that something was terribly wrong. But those of us closest to him never suspected how impossible life had become for him. His decision was, to him, inevitable. In the last year of his life, he began to re-assess his photography and was considering moving into films. He stopped photographing and began to give his unfinished commercial assignments and commissions to his colleagues. Two or three days before his death, while we were standing in the kitchen, talking, he told me nonchalantly that I now had to be the one to look after everything.”

The Fondation Jean-Pascal Imsand has desposited the artist’s archive at  the Fotostiftung Schweiz (Swiss Foundation of Photography) in Winterthur for safekeeping, where researchers, curators and other professionals can study the works by appointment.

Imsand is currently represented by ArteF Gallery, Splügenstrasse 11, 8002 Zürich, Switzerland

A retrospective exhibition contaning 198 original works and an accompanying 192-page catalogue with in-depth essays and a chronology is available to museums, schools and non-commercial galleries. Contact www.jeanpascalimsand.org for further information.

The catalogue is available in English, German, French and Italian:
Jean Pascal Imsand: Photographer
Fondation Jean-Pascal Imsand
Lars Müller Publishers, Baden, Switzerland
ISBN 3-03778-037-1

All images © 2000 Fondation Jean-Pascal Imsand / ProLitteris
Courtesy Fotostiftung Schweiz

Website: www.jeanpascalimsand.org

The Famous, The Infamous and The Anonymous is a 2 hour Power Point presentation on the history of portraiture in photography. Although Power Point is the vehicle for presentation, the actual program was composed using flash and then embedded. Cantwell Studio was the producer of the project. The presentation features sound, film clips, animation and uses both Macromedia and Power Point navigation systems. This lecture has been presented in Santa Fe,  New York, Frankfurt, and Munich. In 2006 it was presented London, Lausanne and San Francisco. A smaller version is being prepared to use to solicit funds for a traveling museum exhibition. The co-curators are Lorraine Anne Davis, Santa Fe and Celina Lunsford of Frankfurt. Nancy Cantwell is the project director.

There is so much to say about this project and the history of portrait photography. As I was going through the files, I remembered that we included some my own personal family portraits taken in the 1950’s with a stereoscopic camera. Here is a teaser. To this day I prefer to sit at a counter vs a table.

Joanne and Nancy at their Grandparents sipping Shirley Temples