Category Archives: Gods and Monsters
Q: Is there an overarching narrative in your photographs with Mexican and Guatemalan figures?
Untitled chromogenic print, 24″ x 24,” edition of 5
A: Maybe, but that’s something for the viewer to judge. I never specify exactly what my work is about for a couple of reasons: my thinking about the meaning of my work constantly evolves, plus I wouldn’t want to cut off other people’s interpretations. Everything is equally valid. I heard Annie Leibovitz interviewed some time ago on the radio. She said that after 40 years as a photographer, everything just gets richer. It doesn’t get easier, it just gets richer. I’ve been a painter for 27 years, a photographer for 11, and I agree completely. Creating this work is an endlessly fascinating intellectual journey. I realize that I am only one voice in a vast art world, but I hope that through the ongoing series of questions and answers on my blog, I am conveying some sense of how artists work and think.
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 32
Untitled, 24″ x 24″ chromogenic print, edition of 5
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
We most certainly need to test ourselves against the most extreme possibilities, just as we are probably obligated not to express, share, and impart the most extreme possibility before it has entered the work of art. As something unique that no other person would and should understand, as one’s personal madness, so to speak, it has to enter into the work to attain its validity and to reveal there an internal law, like primary patterns that become visible only in the transparency of artistic creation. There exist nonetheless two freedoms to express oneself that seem to me the ultimate possibilities: one in the presence of the created object, and the other within one’s actual daily life where one can show another person what one has become through work, and where one may in this way mutually support and help and (here understood humbly) admire one another. In either case, however, it is necessary to show results, and it is neither lack of confidence nor lack of intimacy nor a gesture of exclusion if on does not reveal the tools of one’s personal becoming that are marked by so many confusing and tortuous traits, which are valid only for one’s own use.
Ulrich Baer, editor, The Wisdom of Rilke
Comments are welcome!
Q: Your “Gods and Monsters” series consists of tableaux of Mexican and Guatemalan figures that are photographed in a way that blurs certain elements to abstraction while others are in clear focus. Can you please speak more about this work?
Untitled chromogenic print, 24″ x 24″, edition of 5
A: When I depict the Mexican and, more recently, Guatemalan figures in my pastel-on-sandpaper paintings, they are hard-edged, vibrant, and in-your-face. That’s a result of the way I work in pastel. I slowly and meticulously build up layers of pigment, blend them with my fingers, continually refine and try to find the best, most eye-popping colors. It’s a very slow process that takes months of hard work. An aside… One frustration I have as an artist – I am hardly unique in this – is that my audience only sees the finished piece and they look at it for perhaps ten seconds. They rarely think about how their ten-second experience took me months to create!
In 2002 when I began photographing these figures, I wanted to take the same subject matter and give it an entirely different treatment. So these images are deliberately soft focus, dreamy, and mysterious. I use a medium format camera and shoot film. I choose a narrow depth of field. I hold gels in front of the scene to blur it and to provide unexpected areas of color. Even as a photographer I am a colorist.
I want this work to surprise me and it does, since I don’t usually know what images I will get. Often I don’t even look through the viewfinder as I position the camera and the gels and click the shutter. I only know what I’ve shot after I’ve seen a contact sheet, usually the next day.
The “Gods and Monsters” series began entirely as a reaction to my pastel paintings. The latter are extremely meticulous and labor intensive. At a certain point in the process I know more or less what the finished painting will look like, but there are still weeks of slow, laborious detail work ahead. So my photographic work is spontaneous, serendipitous, and provides me with much-needed instant gratification. I find it endlessly intriguing to have two diametrically opposed ways of working with the same subject.
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 31
A corner of Barbara’s studio
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
When we are children we unquestioningly see the objects around us as alive; we speak to them, give them names, breathe life into them. The imagination knows no bounds. As we grow up, we gradually lose this facility, until we finally arrive in an utterly “demystified” world that draws clear boundaries between what is alive and what is not, between subjective and objective perception. According to Sigmund Freud, culture is the only domain in our modern society that gives a measure of legitimacy to the persistence of this infantile desire to see things as animate. In the field of art, imagination is the precondition on which fiction of any sort rests; in art, mental states can be projected onto objects and images, but not in social reality or the sciences.
Dietrich Karner in Animism: Modernity Through the Looking Glass
Comments are welcome!
Q: Please speak about your background as a Naval officer and aviator and how that has informed your sensibility as an artist.
The studio yesterday
A: At the age of 25 I got my private pilot’s license before spending the next two years amassing thousands of hours of flight time as I earned every flying license and rating I could, ending with a Boeing-727 flight engineer certificate. I joined the Navy when I was 29. I used to think that the 7 years I spent on active duty were wasted – during those 7 years I should have been working on my art – but I see things differently now. The Navy taught me to be disciplined, to be goal-oriented and focused, to love challenges, and in everything I do, to pay attention to the details. Trying to make it as an artist in New York is nothing BUT challenges so these qualities serve me well, whether I’m creating paintings, shooting and printing photographs, or trying to understand the art business and keep up with social media. I enjoy spending long solitary hours working to become a better artist. I am meticulous about craft and will not let a work out of my studio or out of the darkroom until it is as good as I can make it.
Comments are welcome!
Q: Can you speak more about how your studio practice has evolved over the years?
At White Sands, NM; photo by Donna Tang
A: I have spoken at length about how my work and studio practice have evolved since the mid-80s. Please see my interview with Daniel Rothbart at http://www.arterynyc.com/2011/12/a-conversation-with-barbara-rachko/ or click the Blogroll link at right.
Q: Why the chromogenic process above all others?
Mamiya 6 camera
A: First, the cameras that I inherited from Bryan in 2001 were all pre-digital film cameras. Second, I can make chromogenic prints myself, which cuts down on their production cost. Third, I love working with my hands and enjoy the process of making prints in a darkroom. Fourth, I make photographs on days that I don’t go to the studio. It’s a way to take a day off and still make art, a very productive use of my time. At the end of a darkroom session I have a new edition of 5 chromogenic prints, ready to spot and frame.
Comments are welcome.
Q: What do you like to do in the darkroom that brings a print up to perfection?
Untitled chromogenic print, edition of 5
A: That’s a trade secret! I will say that if I am going to sign my name to a piece of art, it must be the best that I am able to make at that point in time. In the darkroom I work deliberately and patiently. I slow down. I make tests, then refine and adjust the yellow and magenta filters on the enlarger to emphasize certain parts of the negative – bring an area forward, make another recede, brighten up something, etc. Usually as a last step, I dodge and burn some areas, always trying to produce the best, most eye-catching images I can.
Q: When did you begin seriously studying photography?
Exhibition catalogue, 2009 solo exhibition at HP Garcia Gallery, NYC; click
“Exhibition catalogue” under Blogroll to view inside pages
A: After I lost my husband, Bryan, on 9/11 – as I’ve discussed elsewhere, Bryan photographed most of the setups for my “Domestic Threats” series – I needed to find a way to continue making art. In June 2002 I began studying photography at the International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York. I took a one week 4 x 5 view camera workshop because Bryan had photographed the setups with a Toyo-Omega view camera. I was surprised to discover that I had absorbed quite a bit of technical information just by watching him. Once I completed the workshop, I decided to start over and to learn as much as I could about photography. So I enrolled in Photography I. Over the next several years I completed about a dozen courses at ICP, eventually learning to make my own large-scale chromogenic prints. Around 2007 I began working seriously as a photographer, creating my photographic series, “Gods and Monsters,” with Bryan’s Mamiya 6 camera. In October 2009 HP Garcia Gallery in New York gave me my first solo photography exhibition (see “Exhibition catalogue” under Blogroll).
I’m busy getting ready for my next solo show there in October. This exhibition will be fairly comprehensive and will include recent photographs (diptychs and single images), new work from the “Black Paintings” series, and a selection of Mexican and Guatemalan figures. There will be an exhibition catalogue and later in the fall, the gallery will publish the first book about my work. I am particularly thrilled about the book, a new, but long overdue, career milestone!
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