At the AIPAD fair in April 2014 I stumbled upon a portfolio at Terry Etherton's booth called Celebrating the Negative by photographer John Loengard. It was a series of 18 gelatin silver prints of the NEGATIVES of iconic photographs. It is a bit ironic that so much attention has been paid these celebrated photographs and almost no attention is given the essential element to all of them. Loengard tracked down these negatives either in major archives or from the photographers estate or family. He photographed them being held either by the photographer, a family member, himself, or an archivist. I have to say I think I would be terrified to hold one of them-somehow they seem even more precious than the prints.
I immediately thought about doing a show at Cassilhaus and asked Terry if there was a framed set of the images of the portfolio and he turned me onto a wonderful organization called Curatorial Assistance in Pasedena that had a non-profit arm that provided a full catalog of traveling exhibitions for hire and Celebrating the Negative was amongst them. Terry organized for me to only have to pay for freight to get the show here-the first time Cassilhaus has ever mounted a touring exhbition. The intricacies of art shipping/insurance/condition reports etc. were eye openers and added a lot of time to the preshow-I may stick with local exhibitions! He also sent along another copy of the portofolio so people could see and handle the prints themselves. There is a book by the same name that accompanies the portfolio.
At the same AIPAD fair I discovered a series called Developer Trays by a Brooklyn based photographer named John Cyr. Photographs of famous photographers' developer trays would seem a bit of a tough sell-until you the see the work. Just stunning and offering a unique perspective on the history of photography and each photographer's individual work style.
Neil Selkirk's Developer Tray
Sally Mann's Developer Tray
I thought this work would be great paired with the Loengard work and the ANALOG show, celebrating traditional film and analog photography, was born. In a moment of fancy I decided to ice the cake and convert our laundry room (inside the main gallery) into a fully working darkroom! David Simonton and Roylee Duvall lent equipment and ephemera from their darkrooms and David staged the room to such detail it was like walking into a time machine. He had empty film cartons taped to the wall with exposure notes, real negatives in the enlarger and clothes line, post cards of photographs that inspired him taped to the walls, a complete library of technical photo texts including Ansel Adams' darkroom guides, beakers and chemicals, process trays (a developer tray of course!) and tongs, dodging and burning tools, safe lights, photo paper, a print washer, and last but not least a cassette boom box with a brilliant and highly curated selection of cassettes.
David at work
The laundry room is right between the main part of the gallery where the Loengard work hung and the project gallery (aka girl power room) where we had the Cyr work so I used the darkroom for signage for the Developer Tray exhibition. I had John Cyr make original B&W prints of the words "John", "Cyr", "Develper", and "Trays" and hung two of them on the clothesline and put two in the process trays. David even supplied me with chemicals to give that authentic darkroom smell.
The exhibition from Curatorial Assistance included the 18 framed images of the negatives plus a framed text panel for each with historical and descriptive information about the image. I thought it would be instructive to have at least one of the actual positives of the images and again Terry Etherton came through by loaning me a vintage GSP of Harry Callahan's Aix-en-Provence 1958 which shows what a magician Callahan was in the darkroom. The negative had all kinds of crazy reflections in the background and none of them appear in the print.
During the run of the show we flew John Cyr down to give an artist talk about his work and hear a few of his fascinating stories of capturing these images. Contrary to what I assumed-that he just asked photographers to send him their unused trays to photograph-he traveled around the country to photograph them at the photographers' studios as most of them are still in daily use. Each story was as unique as the patina on the trays.
I don't think much about the digital world...because I am in the analog world!
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