| 00:00 | (music playing)
|
| 00:17 | Jerry Uelsmann: The evocative powers of art is
very important, how it evokes a feeling or response.
|
| 00:26 | You hope that somehow, because you're being
authentic and sharing depth as best you can,
|
| 00:32 | this kind of imagery that you're creating,
that other people will sense that and find
|
| 00:39 | a way of relating.
|
| 00:41 | (music playing)
|
| 00:46 | Maggie Taylor: For me, art is something that
is just part of my everyday life, so I can't
|
| 00:51 | imagine living without it.
|
| 00:55 | People come up with their own stories and
their own ways of relating to the artwork.
|
| 00:59 | It kind of gives you a little bit of a
window into other people's lives in some way and
|
| 01:04 | helps you reflect on your own life.
|
| 01:06 | (music playing)
|
| 01:11 | Ted Orland: Jerry created a universe of his own.
|
| 01:16 | He makes work that talks back to him
and then he listens to what it says.
|
| 01:21 | (music playing)
|
| 01:24 | Phillip Prodger: You could say that Jerry
was ahead of his time, that he anticipated
|
| 01:28 | Photoshop before Photoshop came on the scene.
|
| 01:33 | Because he was interested in the psychological
aspects of the photograph and the expressive
|
| 01:38 | possibilities of the medium, the work
has a resonance that transcends its time.
|
| 01:43 | (music playing)
|
| 01:47 | Evon Streetman: Neither of them are
dealing with photographic imagery as fact.
|
| 01:53 | I think that that's one of the real
interesting things in Maggie's work.
|
| 01:58 | The intelligence is what totally
separates it from a majority of digital work.
|
| 02:05 | (music playing)
|
| 02:07 | Russell Brown: Like a light beam coming down
out of the sky, in one of Jerry's images,
|
| 02:13 | revealing light on the water.
|
| 02:18 | The colors of Maggie's work coming
out and taking you into her world.
|
| 02:25 | I think they're both the most amazing
modern-day surreal storytellers that I know.
|
| 02:33 | (music playing)
|
| 02:55 | Jerry: The act of creating images
is still, to me, very important, and I relish
|
| 03:04 | the opportunity and am honored by the fact that I
have this environment where I'm allowed to make images.
|
| 03:13 | Maggie: Jerry and I really like images and we
like objects, and that's the reason that we make art.
|
| 03:22 | (music playing)
|
| 03:29 | Our agenda is just to make stuff that we feel is
well crafted and beautiful and has a resonance for us.
|
| 03:37 | (music playing)
|
| 03:41 | Jerry: We're not functioning as commercial
people, so we don't have to please anybody
|
| 03:47 | other than ourselves.
|
| 03:49 | And you know, I've said many
times my goal is to amaze myself.
|
| 03:52 | You can't say, today
I'm going to amaze myself.
|
| 03:55 | You say, today I'm going to
start making marks on paper.
|
| 03:59 | That's the way it begins.
|
| 04:01 | And it's after the fact that you look
back and think, well, wait a minute.
|
| 04:05 | (music playing)
|
| 04:15 | Maggie and I have to invent our realities.
|
| 04:18 | I happen to use photography.
|
| 04:21 | Maggie happens to use the computer.
|
| 04:22 | You know, it comes from this deep commitment
to things that you believe in, of the filtering
|
| 04:29 | through who you are, what your concerns
are, that it's not based on the craft.
|
| 04:37 | From my personal point of view, if when someone
looks at my photograph, if their first thought
|
| 04:44 | is, how did he make this?
I feel I've failed.
|
| 04:48 | I don't mind that being the
second question. I'm used to that.
|
| 04:52 | But their first response should be some
authentic "gee, this is weird," or "I had a dream like
|
| 04:57 | that." or "boy, that makes me feel lonely or happy."
You know, it's an authentic human response.
|
| 05:04 | But photographers, in general, when they saw
early work, they would talk in terms of the
|
| 05:10 | technique, but the technique is not the
image; the technique supports the image.
|
| 05:15 | This is like your sense of craft.
|
| 05:17 | It's that kind of thing that opens up
possibilities to create, in my case, visual phenomena that
|
| 05:25 | was unachievable before--certainly before
Photoshop--but with traditional photography.
|
| 05:38 | Phillip Prodger: There's a debate that's
been raging in photography since almost the day
|
| 05:43 | of it's invention, about whether
photography qualifies to be an art form or whether it
|
| 05:48 | is more of a commercial tool.
|
| 05:51 | And at the time that Jerry came on the scene,
those debates were raging as loud as they ever have.
|
| 05:57 | Keith Davis: In the 1950s, photography was
still dominated by a very sophisticated notion
|
| 06:04 | of using the camera to bring back vignettes
of true worldly experience, as in the work
|
| 06:10 | of Cartier-Bresson, or
the work of W. Gene Smith.
|
| 06:13 | Peter Bunnell: You had an environment in
which the photography community was trying to get
|
| 06:18 | over the heavy impress of social realism and
photojournalism that developed in the '30s
|
| 06:24 | and during the war.
|
| 06:25 | But you had then the emergence of another
whole generation and a whole different area
|
| 06:30 | of coverage, and probably the most exemplary
person in that regard would be Ansel Adams.
|
| 06:38 | And obviously there's nothing more
photographic than an Ansel Adams landscape.
|
| 06:43 | Keith: So, we have these interesting currents,
this kind of classical mode of using photography
|
| 06:49 | to bring back the vignettes of real experience.
|
| 06:51 | It's in that context that Jerry's work
comes to the fore and really pushes this notion
|
| 06:58 | of the straight photograph
into this entirely new arena.
|
| 07:02 | (music playing)
|
| 07:17 | Ted: Jerry's rise into the art world is
one of those amazing, almost unique stories.
|
| 07:24 | The gist of it is that in 1960, or thereabouts,
he was still a graduate student under Henry
|
| 07:30 | Holmes Smith, at the
University of Indiana I believe.
|
| 07:34 | And five years later, he was having a show
at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
|
| 07:38 | Peter: The Museum of Modern Art was the mecca.
|
| 07:41 | That was the place.
|
| 07:42 | There was one gallery, called Limelight, which
was actually a coffee shop at Sheraton Square
|
| 07:48 | in New York, where in the back were four panels
hanging from the ceiling, and that was it. That was it.
|
| 07:55 | There was no 59th Street, 57th Street.
|
| 07:58 | Keith: John Szarkowski became
curator at The Modern in 1962.
|
| 08:04 | John had a very powerful and distinct
vision about what photography was all about.
|
| 08:09 | He saw photography as a
uniquely special visual language.
|
| 08:14 | So, the program he put together, beginning
in '62, had enormous impact on how the field
|
| 08:22 | at large thought about the medium.
|
| 08:24 | Jerry: I called the photography of Museum of
Modern Art and Szarkowski answered the phone.
|
| 08:30 | I mean this wouldn't have happened
today or later in his life, you know?
|
| 08:34 | And I said, "I'm Jerry Uelsmann and I
teach at the University of Florida.
|
| 08:38 | I'm going to be coming to New York, and I'd
like to be able to schedule an appointment
|
| 08:42 | to look at some of the photographs in your
study room." It was there called their study room.
|
| 08:47 | He said, "Oh, yes." He says, "I know your
work." And he said, "Well, why don't you bring
|
| 08:52 | some work with you when you come?"
And I thought "oh, hey, this is for sure.
|
| 08:57 | I'm glad they do that." So, I went to New York and
we sat down at a table, and I showed him my work.
|
| 09:06 | And John--it won't make sense because people
don't won't know ahead--John had this--
|
| 09:10 | he is one of the slower talkers of America.
|
| 09:13 | And he loved to hold his glasses and go
like this, and he'd look at these things.
|
| 09:18 | And you know, you just don't know what he's
thinking, and he'd go to the next one, and
|
| 09:22 | like that and mmhm, make little
sounds and all this kind of stuff.
|
| 09:28 | And you're sitting there.
|
| 09:29 | And finally, he turned, he says, "You know,
I'd like to show this work here at The Modern."
|
| 09:36 | I'll tell you, my knees were ready to burst.
|
| 09:38 | I'm like, oh, my God.
Well, yeah, that would be nice, you know?
|
| 09:43 | It was a really wonderful experience in that
once you could say that to people, that was
|
| 09:50 | something that they could recognize.
|
| 09:51 | "Oh, you had a show at The Modern?" And to
this day, people find that on my credentials
|
| 09:57 | and that impresses them.
|
| 10:00 | (music playing)
|
| 10:08 | Keith: It was the peak.
|
| 10:10 | To have a one-person show at The Modern in those
days was as much as any photographer could expect.
|
| 10:18 | There was no other place to go.
|
| 10:19 | And especially given the nature of Jerry's
work, the unconventional, non-purist nature
|
| 10:26 | of his work made, I think, that
exhibition all the more significant.
|
| 10:33 | Peter: First of all, of course, it was
extraordinary, the fact that John Szarkowski did it, because,
|
| 10:39 | in fact, John Szarkowski's attitude about
photography, much more formalist, and much
|
| 10:44 | more straightforward.
|
| 10:47 | But he sensed in Uelsmann's work this
incredible technique, which I then take it back to his
|
| 10:53 | early training at RIT.
|
| 10:58 | (music playing)
|
| 11:04 | We were at RIT, Rochester
Institute of Technology, together.
|
| 11:08 | RIT, at that time, was just becoming
one of the major schools of photography.
|
| 11:17 | That is to say it had only offered a two-year
associate degree, and so that would be then
|
| 11:24 | when you would graduate, so to
speak, from a sound, technical basis.
|
| 11:29 | And I bring this up specifically in our
context of Jerry because that's where he's at.
|
| 11:36 | I mean, he knows how to do it.
|
| 11:39 | Jerry: Initially, when I went to RIT, I really
thought I was on the two-year track to become
|
| 11:46 | a portrait photographer.
|
| 11:48 | They had the basic courses.
|
| 11:51 | Then they had these technical courses
like sensitometry and photo chemistry.
|
| 11:57 | And to my surprise,
I did well in those courses.
|
| 12:01 | I mean, at one point, I considered that
maybe I wanted to be one of the tech majors.
|
| 12:07 | But there was something fascinating about
developing film that had been exposed at random
|
| 12:13 | exposures and then taking a densotometer and
plotting the curves for how the--I mean it's,
|
| 12:20 | it's complex science, but it was
emerging as a science at that time.
|
| 12:25 | On the other hand, when I realize that
that particular program didn't involve taking
|
| 12:31 | photographs anymore--you had mechanically
exposed paper and scientific things to deal
|
| 12:36 | with--I really focused on the portrait part.
|
| 12:42 | Keith: RIT, back in those days, was a technical
school, but it was a unique technical school.
|
| 12:50 | Minor White's teaching up
there for at least a while.
|
| 12:53 | Ralph Hattersley, other people like that,
and the adjacent nature of the Eastman House
|
| 12:56 | there gave both this incredible technical
background, and a real sense of history, a
|
| 13:02 | real sense of what the medium had meant
to previous generations of picture makers.
|
| 13:06 | And so that combination was pretty special.
|
| 13:09 | It was not something you could really get
in perhaps any other program at the time.
|
| 13:14 | Peter: Minor White was a photographer who
was brought in, literally, to teach first-year
|
| 13:21 | and last-year students.
|
| 13:23 | He had a broad awareness of the history of
art, the history of art photography, and he
|
| 13:29 | was a significant contributing
artist photographer in his own right.
|
| 13:36 | Jerry: Many people had trouble
because he was just so from another planet.
|
| 13:43 | I remember very vividly at one point he showed
an image and he said, "Now, when I made this,
|
| 13:49 | the spirit came down." And I'm like,
"I'm from inner-city Detroit, so excuse me.
|
| 13:54 | I want to know about this spirit coming
down." You know, he'd give assignments.
|
| 13:59 | The one that sticks out very much for me,
and that reminds me of him all the time, is
|
| 14:04 | doorways of ominous portent.
|
| 14:06 | And I'm going back to getting the
dictionary out to look what that means.
|
| 14:13 | But what it does, it gives you an insight into
that photographs can function in a metaphorical
|
| 14:19 | way; they can function beyond just what
is literally replicated within the image.
|
| 14:26 | One time I was showing him a contact sheet,
and I'd had, for whatever reason, there was
|
| 14:32 | someone standing and there was a black, dark
doorway, and then the next shot was somebody close up.
|
| 14:37 | It had a dark background.
|
| 14:39 | So anyway, I'm showing this contact sheet to
Minor White, and we used to use these cardboard
|
| 14:43 | L's that, you know, you go around.
|
| 14:45 | And he said, "Well, I think you should print this one."
And I said, "Minor, that goes across the line.
|
| 14:51 | That's that other shot there." He said,
"Well,that doesn't matter." So, the idea that you
|
| 14:56 | get permission to do that,
what's wrong with that?
|
| 14:59 | So, you know, that let me explore having black
backgrounds so that things could be--go from
|
| 15:06 | one frame to the another.
|
| 15:07 | You decide later what the frame would be.
|
| 15:08 | I mean, there's just so many little incidences like
that that were little clues that I was ready to explore.
|
| 15:18 | Jerry Uelsmann: I could easily take--this is
with the figure against the black background,
|
| 15:24 | which is clear film.
|
| 15:25 | And where is this other?
|
| 15:27 | Here's the one with these.
|
| 15:28 | So that you know, you could print that in
one enlarger as a single straight negative,
|
| 15:35 | but would have a multiple-exposure effect.
|
| 15:39 | And I knew enough about film and all that
that these things were sort of a logical way
|
| 15:44 | of thinking about it, of dealing with black.
|
| 15:47 | And from that I moved to--I used
to have an old Bronica. And I had.
|
| 15:52 | I can turn this off now.
|
| 15:54 | This is just simply black felt paper,
which I could mask at my camera lens.
|
| 16:00 | And when you block--we used
to put this in a lens shade.
|
| 16:03 | I'll make this closer.
|
| 16:04 | But if this were a lens shade, this here would
be right against the camera lens, and because
|
| 16:10 | it's against the camera lens,
it would produce a soft edge.
|
| 16:14 | If I shot a background and then rotated this
180 degrees, I could shoot a foreground and
|
| 16:21 | get it to blend on the same piece of film.
|
| 16:25 | But that became challenging, because you'd
suddenly find an interesting background, old
|
| 16:31 | building, but then where is the foreground?
|
| 16:32 | Then soon I just left it blank and
then later would sandwich the negatives.
|
| 16:38 | And this is a contact sheet,
which doesn't show up very well.
|
| 16:41 | But this particular tree here,
you can see how it fades.
|
| 16:44 | It's two identical
pictures of that same tree now.
|
| 16:49 | And now this is the way they were taken,
but then if I flip this one and put it on top
|
| 16:54 | of that one and line it up, you could then have a
symmetrical image that you could print in one enlarger.
|
| 17:01 | (music playing)
|
| 17:06 | When I first began multiple printing in the
darkroom, I was raised in darkrooms in Rochester
|
| 17:13 | Institute of Technology, a high-tech
institution where there was one enlarger in the darkroom.
|
| 17:19 | So what I would do, I'd take my piece of
photo paper and make a little drawing where the
|
| 17:23 | head was going to fall off this thing.
|
| 17:26 | Take a piece of paper, print the
head and dodge, like, by hand.
|
| 17:30 | Then I'd put that--and I had to
mark it so I knew which side went in.
|
| 17:33 | Change negatives, refocus,
dah-dah-dah-dah, what might be the foreground.
|
| 17:39 | Get my drawing out.
|
| 17:40 | Try to line it up. And then the developer,
I'm watching this, and nine times out of ten,
|
| 17:45 | it's a little bit this way,
it's a little bit that way.
|
| 17:47 | I worked that way for about, it had to
be, maybe, I don't know, six months.
|
| 17:53 | And I've got--and I was in the university
darkroom here, which had eight enlargers in it.
|
| 17:58 | So I had the prints washing in a little--
they used to have these spinner-type washes
|
| 18:02 | there--one day after wasting twenty sheets of
paper to get two good prints, and I'm looking
|
| 18:08 | at these other enlargers.
|
| 18:10 | And suddenly I go, oh my God.
|
| 18:12 | Once I had the enlargers,
negatives in different enlargers,
|
| 18:17 | if the one was a half inch
off, I would move the easel.
|
| 18:19 | I could mark it easier.
|
| 18:20 | Once I had the exposures, I didn't have to
keep changing negatives and the exposures.
|
| 18:25 | I mean, the speed with which I
could explore increased a hundred fold.
|
| 18:31 | It was a major breakthrough at the time.
|
| 18:34 | Peter: He becomes such an incredible
craftsman in technique, and many of them were
|
| 18:41 | very simple negative sandwiches.
|
| 18:43 | I mean and so it's no big deal to do that.
|
| 18:46 | It's a big deal to decide to do it and then
secondarily, to do it so well that it doesn't
|
| 18:54 | become obvious, but it becomes
part of the entire visual experience.
|
| 19:05 | Jerry: This is the print that we're
going to create today in the darkroom.
|
| 19:10 | It involves five different negatives.
|
| 19:13 | The sky is one negative of this clouds.
|
| 19:16 | This rocky foreground with the
mountain is the second negative.
|
| 19:20 | The silhouetted figure,
transparent figure, is a third negative.
|
| 19:25 | The face here on the rock, embedded
in the rock, is a fourth negative.
|
| 19:31 | This chair is actually treated like it's a
negative, but it's just two torn pieces of
|
| 19:37 | black paper put in an
enlarger to create that stripe.
|
| 19:41 | We'll take a piece of paper,
and this is now printing the foreground.
|
| 19:50 | And I've got it set.
|
| 19:51 | I can control the contrast.
|
| 19:53 | So I'm making this a little more contrasty.
|
| 19:57 | And what I'm going to do--those of you who
don't know about photography, a little hard
|
| 20:00 | to understand--if I go to the raw
white light, I can darken that foreground.
|
| 20:06 | So that foreground I want to be darkened.
|
| 20:09 | And then I go to, this is the sky negative.
|
| 20:13 | It doesn't require any dodging, so once I
get that in this easel, it's just a matter
|
| 20:18 | of letting it print.
|
| 20:20 | And I also have it at a higher contrast.
|
| 20:22 | And this is a little longer exposure.
|
| 20:25 | Normally, exposures are shorter.
|
| 20:28 | This has that transparent figure, and this will be
a very short exposure where you can see that figure.
|
| 20:36 | All right. And then this is the figure being embedded on
the rock, and this is also a very short exposure.
|
| 20:45 | Sometimes I lighten this area a little bit.
|
| 20:49 | And then this is the chair in the sky.
|
| 20:57 | And I know like to keep it light on one
end, so this does involve dodging.
|
| 21:02 | So I want to keep it darker up here.
|
| 21:05 | This is just giving more light to the top and
less to the bottom, so it sort of fades in and out.
|
| 21:11 | But I want it blank it down.
|
| 21:14 | Now, the most magical part of the process is
when you put this into the developer and--
|
| 21:23 | it helps if you talk to it.
|
| 21:25 | It should go two minutes.
|
| 21:29 | This is what keeps you going.
|
| 21:31 | Once--sometimes the first time you
see this, you're hooked for life.
|
| 21:34 | I still think it's magic, after all these years.
|
| 21:38 | Watching this thing come up in the
developer is just amazing to me.
|
| 21:43 | And I've been doing it
for over sixty years so...
|
| 21:46 | And at this point, truly,
you're focused on, do I like this image?
|
| 21:53 | What else can I do?
|
| 21:54 | I actually did a bunch of variations,
but this is the version that I'm happiest with.
|
| 22:00 | And after working on this image for almost a
week, I came up with a title, which I call,
|
| 22:07 | The Forgotten Promise.
|
| 22:10 | You do have a lot of controls, a lot more
then people realize, in terms of increasing
|
| 22:15 | the contrast of an image or decreasing the
contrast or just with light, making things a lot darker.
|
| 22:23 | I didn't want the eye to be
pulled off in the foreground.
|
| 22:25 | I wanted to keep it dark here, go through the rocks,
and get the sense of distance in the background.
|
| 22:35 | There's this dialog, an ongoing dialog with
those materials, that causes those images to occur.
|
| 22:43 | You don't have to complete the image
instantaneously. I mean, you can.
|
| 22:48 | There is nothing wrong with that.
|
| 22:50 | But there is this ongoing process that is the
dominant way of working in all the other arts.
|
| 22:57 | No one else gets that instant picture or that
instant sculpture, or, you know, like that.
|
| 23:01 | There is that time frame there where
there is this reinvestigation of the means.
|
| 23:08 | I mean, if you think about it, instead of
if every time we said photography, we said
|
| 23:14 | light-sensitive materials,
that's a whole different concept. Now wait a minute.
|
| 23:18 | It's like you've got this thing and if you--
if I put my hand there and flash the lens it's
|
| 23:23 | going to leave the--I mean, it's, this
is what I'm using to create these images.
|
| 23:28 | (music playing)
|
| 23:35 | Peter: It should be understood, of
course, that Jerry, realizing, in fact, that
|
| 23:40 | there was probably little future in making
personally expressive photographs, so he actually
|
| 23:47 | was enrolled in audio visual education at
Indiana University, and it was then, through
|
| 23:53 | Henry Holmes Smith, that he
was, in effect, discovered.
|
| 23:56 | Phillip: When Jerry left Indiana,
he almost immediately went to the University
|
| 24:02 | of Florida, where he founded one of the first
MFA programs in the country in photography.
|
| 24:07 | Jerry: The teaching job, for
many years, was my main support system.
|
| 24:12 | You know, people weren't buying photographs,
and I'd get occasional fees for lecturing,
|
| 24:17 | but the more, I suppose, important, from my
perspective, part of it was is constant interacting
|
| 24:26 | with young people.
|
| 24:28 | To me, this was the most formative time because
suddenly, then, I'm surrounded by young artists
|
| 24:36 | and they're painters, sculptures, you know,
we're having coffee every day, we're drawing
|
| 24:40 | on napkins, we're talking about our lives.
|
| 24:42 | We pile into a station wagon that one of us
has and drive straight through to New York, taking
|
| 24:50 | turns driving 24 hours so we can go
see the latest shows that are going on.
|
| 24:54 | Yeah, but there was a kind of bonding and being
part of the scene that was really important to me.
|
| 25:01 | Evon Streetman: I think one of the things
I admired about Jerry tremendously was, at
|
| 25:08 | the time that we were teaching together, he
had accrued a level of fame that was absolutely
|
| 25:16 | enviable among photographers.
|
| 25:20 | And Jerry would bring back the bad
reviews and read them to the graduate class.
|
| 25:27 | And for him, it was like, that was as much
a part of his teaching as anything else.
|
| 25:34 | It's if you're going to be an artist, if you're
really going to stick your neck out, if you're
|
| 25:39 | going to put it our there for the public,
don't think for a moment that someone isn't
|
| 25:44 | going to occasionally stomp on it.
|
| 25:47 | You either have to have, or you have to develop,
a tough enough hide that you can accept that
|
| 25:55 | and go right on with what you're doing.
|
| 25:58 | When you think of how easily you can be
maimed by someone's saying a comment that--I had
|
| 26:06 | this happen once early in my career.
|
| 26:08 | This would have been in that same time period
in my career, in the '60s, where I had done
|
| 26:12 | a lot of images that had
foregrounds and backgrounds.
|
| 26:16 | And someone, quite innocently--I don't even
remember who did it--they said, you know,
|
| 26:20 | you've done a lot of foregrounds and
backgrounds, and that little thing bugged me for years.
|
| 26:26 | I'd go in the darkroom and I'd start on something--well,
Jerry you've done a lot of foregrounds and backgrounds.
|
| 26:32 | And it took me a while to get the mental
leap that made me realize that that was a form,
|
| 26:38 | and the analogy I make now is that
it's like the haiku or the sonnet.
|
| 26:42 | They're forms of poetry,
but they don't limit the content.
|
| 26:46 | Because of the fact that I wasn't around
traditional photographers, all the experimental things
|
| 26:52 | I did I got support for.
|
| 26:55 | (music playing)
|
| 27:04 | Ted: Jerry had a way of
orchestrating the darkroom as if he were doing a dance.
|
| 27:11 | Keith: He was trying to expand the language
of the medium, to make pictures that did justice
|
| 27:20 | to the truly broad potentials of
what happens when light hits silver.
|
| 27:27 | Photography is that primal, light hitting
silver, and that's such a beautiful and sort
|
| 27:31 | of poetic thought.
|
| 27:32 | I think that he really loved that and
wanted to see how far one could push that.
|
| 27:39 | If part of photography consists of that
openness to experimentation, Jerry is just the perfect
|
| 27:49 | exemplar of a person who works that way.
|
| 27:53 | Peter: They're about ideas that are
different from simply transposing reality.
|
| 28:03 | These would be shocking to people.
|
| 28:04 | They would be unusual to people.
|
| 28:06 | (music playing)
|
| 28:12 | Jerry: I can remember in the early '60s going to New
York and I'd see friends and other photographers
|
| 28:19 | up there, and they'd look at my work, and the
comment that just always threw me was they'd
|
| 28:24 | say, "well this this is interesting, but
this is not photography." Excuse me, I'm in the
|
| 28:31 | darkroom for hours.
I buy everything at the camera store.
|
| 28:34 | I mean, what am I supposed to call this?
|
| 28:38 | Phillip: Jerry's photography plays on one of
the very special characteristics of photography,
|
| 28:44 | and that is to be convincing, to show something,
ostensibly, the way it really looks in life.
|
| 28:50 | And because Jerry inverts that and really
makes things that are completely implausible
|
| 28:56 | come to life, his photography
was seen as somehow dishonest.
|
| 29:01 | Keith: It seemed to violate expected notions about
this truth-telling nature of the medium, and it did.
|
| 29:10 | (music playing)
|
| 29:20 | Ted: I actually don't think
the work was controversial.
|
| 29:24 | It was viewed as different.
It was viewed as unique.
|
| 29:27 | I think it was just the sheer force of
Jerry's vision that people could not ignore.
|
| 29:36 | (music playing)
|
| 29:42 | Keith: He was exploring the inherent nature of
the medium in a way that no one else had done.
|
| 29:47 | So, controversy is, to some
degree, a sign of success.
|
| 29:50 | It's a sign that you have actually covered
some new territory, that you have actually
|
| 29:55 | thought about the medium in a fresh way.
|
| 29:58 | (music playing)
|
| 30:06 | Phillip: There's an idea that comes out of
photographic modernism, and even before, that
|
| 30:11 | somehow the photographer should know in
advance the effects he or she is looking for when
|
| 30:16 | they click the shutter, so that they control
every phase of the process and they're seeing
|
| 30:22 | what the viewer will ultimately see.
Jerry changed all that.
|
| 30:26 | He said, "Instead of previsualizing a photograph,
we should postvisualize it." Instead of looking
|
| 30:33 | at the negative as a final result,
he looks at it as a departure point.
|
| 30:38 | You start with the negative, and that becomes the basis
for improvisation and experimentation going forward.
|
| 30:47 | Jerry: The dominant aesthetic, well, what
we learned or we thought was the dominant
|
| 30:54 | aesthetic--it probably still
is--is the decisive moment.
|
| 30:57 | That was coined by Cartier-Bresson.
|
| 30:59 | I tried to imply that those same decisive
moments can occur in the context of the darkroom,
|
| 31:08 | that the darkroom was
essentially a visual research lab.
|
| 31:11 | If you just do the mental gear shifting
required to think that way, because I've had decisive
|
| 31:17 | moments when suddenly, whoa, that
tree will blend to that building.
|
| 31:21 | Now, that's a decisive moment.
|
| 31:23 | When you think about the whole world of painting,
where we're talking about similar use of materials--
|
| 31:29 | paint, oil on canvas, whatever-- think of
the breadth of the imagery that occurs there.
|
| 31:34 | And when we're looking at paintings, we're not
talking about, well, Leonardo had a different
|
| 31:39 | kind of paint that he was using.
You know, it was his vision.
|
| 31:45 | It's the celebration of the
vision that we're talking about.
|
| 31:50 | (music playing)
|
| 32:21 | Evon: I look back, and I always felt
there was a certain unsettled disquiet in Jerry.
|
| 32:27 | He never seemed, never seemed totally at ease.
|
| 32:32 | I don't mean he was
uncomfortable with people, certainly not.
|
| 32:37 | But he never seemed totally
comfortable with himself, in himself.
|
| 32:40 | There was always something that was missing
he was always looking for, and he found it.
|
| 32:48 | (music playing)
|
| 32:53 | Maggie: I had a pretty typical
midwestern upbringing that didn't necessarily involve
|
| 32:59 | anything with the arts per se,
but lots of sports and outdoor activities.
|
| 33:06 | (music playing)
|
| 33:14 | And for me, reading was fabulous.
|
| 33:17 | I remember asking my mom to take
me to the public library in St.
|
| 33:20 | Pete, Florida, so I could get more
science fiction books on a regular basis.
|
| 33:25 | (music playing)
|
| 33:35 | And I was just allowed to watch tons of t.v.
|
| 33:37 | All my free time when I was at home,
I watched television, hours and hours every day, all
|
| 33:43 | kinds of sitcoms and reruns and Star Trek.
|
| 33:46 | (music playing)
|
| 33:51 | And I felt like these were kind of my friends;
in some way they were people that I was interested
|
| 33:57 | in and they had stories to tell that were
interesting, so I wanted to kind of be part
|
| 34:01 | of their family or be in
their world in some way.
|
| 34:07 | And I also got interested in drama
while I was in high school, being in plays.
|
| 34:13 | The idea of simply playing a totally different
role, just getting out of yourself and being
|
| 34:19 | something totally different
and trying be convincing at it.
|
| 34:23 | But I was never particularly good at theater.
|
| 34:25 | I just liked participating in it.
|
| 34:31 | When I went to Yale, as I was going through
the application process I thought, here's
|
| 34:35 | a school that basically does
feature a good drama school.
|
| 34:40 | Once I got there, all of my roommates were
very interested in singing and dancing and
|
| 34:46 | participating in singing groups and theatrical things,
and I realized I don't have those skills at all.
|
| 34:53 | I can't sing or dance.
|
| 34:54 | I am not up to doing this.
|
| 34:57 | But at the same time, it opened a lot of
other possibilities, because then I got to think
|
| 35:00 | about, wow, what else, what
would I want to major in?
|
| 35:04 | And luckily for me, at that time,
you had several years to decide.
|
| 35:09 | And I had a lot of friends who were
taking other classes, like photography.
|
| 35:15 | And in particular, I had two friends who were
taking beginning photography and telling me
|
| 35:20 | how interesting it was to go into the Art
and Architecture building, which was kind
|
| 35:25 | of a mystery to me, and go down into
the basement and develop pictures.
|
| 35:30 | And I went into my first photo class
basically thinking, this will be an easy credit.
|
| 35:36 | It will be the opposite of all my other
classes with heavy reading materials.
|
| 35:41 | And I can just, you know,
wander around with a camera.
|
| 35:43 | So, I borrowed a camera from my father for
that semester and I wandered around taking
|
| 35:49 | pictures of people.
|
| 35:50 | But for me, it was terrifying to walk
around with a camera and should I ask the people
|
| 35:56 | if I can take their picture or
should I just take their picture?
|
| 35:59 | Do I want to be in their face or not?
|
| 36:02 | And after maybe one semester of doing that
and coming up with horrible images of people,
|
| 36:08 | I realized I might be better suited to
landscapes, or doing portraits of buildings.
|
| 36:16 | And even though I was majoring in philosophy,
I was most interested in my photography classes
|
| 36:21 | and I kept taking
photography every single semester.
|
| 36:24 | At that point I really realized I wanted
to go to graduate school in photography.
|
| 36:28 | And there were several
places I was considering.
|
| 36:31 | But the fact was, my parents were living in
Florida, and to get the in-state tuition in
|
| 36:36 | Florida was a fraction of the
cost of any of those other places.
|
| 36:40 | By the time I came to Gainesville to have
an interview, I was basically just really
|
| 36:45 | nervous about the whole thing.
|
| 36:47 | I just wanted them to accept
my work and think it was good.
|
| 36:51 | Evon: It was just a little stiff.
|
| 36:54 | It was a little controlled.
|
| 36:57 | It was just like a straight shot right to
the target, with no left and no right, very
|
| 37:03 | little room for other interpretations.
|
| 37:07 | I don't think she trusted all of her psychological
and intellectual capacity at that particular time.
|
| 37:15 | We had the Graduate Record Exam
and her scores were off the charts.
|
| 37:21 | Rarely, we had never had an art student in
the whole history of the Art Department had
|
| 37:26 | those kind of scores.
|
| 37:28 | In a very short amount of time, you could
sense that this was a sincere, articulate,
|
| 37:34 | intelligent person that was not here just
to do the same thing, that they were open
|
| 37:39 | to the expression of ideas.
|
| 37:42 | The whole mood of the studio disciplines
here at the University of Florida were the most
|
| 37:51 | joined and eager, like to
participate, to give and take.
|
| 37:56 | We would actually send students to other
departments for a semester of study in printmaking.
|
| 38:03 | Possibly, depending on what you were doing
with your photographs, we were really trying
|
| 38:07 | to find the niche that the
student most aptly belonged in.
|
| 38:15 | I was just trying my best to find my own path,
I guess, and find my own voice in this, and
|
| 38:21 | thought that I should experiment with the printmaking,
the color, some of Jerry's darkroom techniques.
|
| 38:28 | But I wasn't as happy with
the printmaking as a process.
|
| 38:33 | You can take a printmaking
class and do photo etching.
|
| 38:36 | So, it was a little scary for me at first,
because I'm not so technical, and I had never
|
| 38:40 | done anything like printmaking, with the
acid and the metal and the, you know, all kinds
|
| 38:46 | of monoprints we would
make, and things like that.
|
| 38:48 | So, these were family snapshots that I
started using to make a little photo etchings from.
|
| 38:54 | That was actually my father.
|
| 38:56 | This is my grandfather, for some
reason was on the floor barking like a dog.
|
| 39:01 | These were all kind of experimental things
that I was trying to do, just to kind of,
|
| 39:05 | you know, see what the
other possibilities were.
|
| 39:09 | And the idea that these were linked to me
more personally was kind of a novel thing
|
| 39:14 | to me at that point.
|
| 39:15 | So, then I started really playing with things more
that were old toys and things from my own past.
|
| 39:24 | So, this was some of the work I did just a
little bit after that that kind of shows that
|
| 39:28 | I was trying to break away from
doing really straight photographic work.
|
| 39:33 | Some were with sun, out in the yard.
|
| 39:36 | Some were in my apartment, with just
a few really simple clamp-on lamps.
|
| 39:40 | I didn't have any nice equipment or anything.
|
| 39:43 | Most of them had a kind of personal story.
|
| 39:45 | This is like a family snapshot that has paint on
it and then set other snapshots on top of it.
|
| 39:53 | These were all things that had some
connection to this story for me, and I wanted to kind
|
| 39:59 | of bring them all together but then
rephotograph it so you have sort of all these layers, but
|
| 40:04 | it's all, like, on one
photographic surface there.
|
| 40:08 | Everybody was so happy to
have something different.
|
| 40:10 | Frankly, they were also tired of seeing my
suburban scenes I think that they were like,
|
| 40:14 | well, this is great. We love it.
This is so different for you.
|
| 40:18 | (music playing)
|
| 40:26 | Jerry: Her work, certainly when she had her MFA show,
was very, very distinctive and very engaging,
|
| 40:37 | and a lot of people responded.
|
| 40:41 | Maggie's work began to develop more
imagination and fantasy and richness of ideas.
|
| 40:50 | I think she had to admit how damn
bright she was, and she began to use it.
|
| 41:00 | I was thinking that within two years, I could
get a masters degree and then get a teaching
|
| 41:05 | job somewhere, so it was kind of like anywhere
in the country that they will have me, I will
|
| 41:09 | go and teach photography.
|
| 41:12 | And then I'll also have time to make my photography,
so that would be the support system for making
|
| 41:16 | my art would be my income as a teacher.
(music playing)
|
| 41:21 | By the time I finished, two years later, I
actually probably felt more confused and felt
|
| 41:27 | like the world of photography is much broader
than I had realized, and it's basically part
|
| 41:32 | of the whole contemporary art scene.
|
| 41:35 | And maybe I'm not going to go teach
anywhere; maybe I'll just make images.
|
| 41:40 | And I saw the possibilities of being
an artist in a much broader sense.
|
| 41:46 | (music playing)
|
| 41:52 | I thought, what I'd like to do is go on and
work with some other objects, not necessarily
|
| 41:56 | all my own family snapshots, but maybe some
other things that I could collect or create.
|
| 42:02 | So, I found that it was kind of interesting
to go to these flea markets around the area,
|
| 42:06 | in North Florida--antique
stores too, but mostly flea markets.
|
| 42:10 | And I would buy all kinds of
bits and pieces broken things.
|
| 42:12 | So, these were like little plastic
horses that somebody's dog had chewed up.
|
| 42:17 | And I took old books and whatever else I
found and just started to kind of build things.
|
| 42:21 | And this was kind of my way of
working for, really, about ten years.
|
| 42:25 | And it was totally fabricated imagery.
|
| 42:27 | And at the time, like a lot of the work that
I was seeing in the magazines and work that
|
| 42:32 | was being reviewed in New York, was
staged or fabricated photography.
|
| 42:38 | So, this definitely seemed like the way to go.
|
| 42:39 | It was just like, why take your camera out
into the real world when you can fabricate
|
| 42:45 | something in the studio
that's more meaningful to you?
|
| 42:50 | But it was a very frustrating way of
working sometimes, and I went through quite a lot
|
| 42:53 | of film, 4 x 5 film.
|
| 42:55 | I'd go in the darkroom and load twenty or
thirty sheets of film and go out and set this
|
| 42:58 | up, and it's late in the day and the shadows
are kind of changing rapidly, and so I was
|
| 43:04 | constantly reshooting.
|
| 43:06 | And I wanted to try to include stuff from
my own sort of organic Florida surroundings.
|
| 43:11 | So, we have tons of these wonderful little
green tree frogs, and the idea that I could
|
| 43:15 | have them be included as characters in
the images was kind of interesting to me.
|
| 43:19 | Or the fish from my fish tank, in what I sort
of thought of as a photographer's studio there,
|
| 43:25 | like a little diorama set
up for them to pose in.
|
| 43:27 | The problem was these
things didn't always cooperate.
|
| 43:32 | What I thought I was gonna get was the fish
higher up and looking right at me with a nice
|
| 43:36 | bulging eye and looking really beautiful.
|
| 43:37 | What I got was kind of the fish not being
terribly happy and waiting to go back in his fish tank.
|
| 43:43 | So, I couldn't exactly get him
to pose the way that I wanted.
|
| 43:46 | I'd have to go back on another day and reshoot,
and I just wasted tons and tons of film.
|
| 43:51 | So, it became a more and more frustrating
way of working, really, when I wanted to use
|
| 43:56 | things that were ephemeral.
|
| 43:58 | (music playing)
|
| 44:05 | Russell Brown: I joined Adobe
as their first art director.
|
| 44:08 | I was influenced by Jerry at high school.
|
| 44:12 | And my teacher says,
"Take a look at this guy's work.
|
| 44:15 | He's doing some amazing stuff in the darkroom."
The tree's roots growing out of the building
|
| 44:22 | was the very first image that I saw.
|
| 44:24 | I was just stunned.
|
| 44:27 | How was this possible at all?
|
| 44:30 | How did he create that?
|
| 44:32 | So, I'm going into the darkroom in
1973 and trying to mimic Jerry Uelsmann.
|
| 44:39 | His comfortable space is the
darkroom and an analog world.
|
| 44:44 | We, at Adobe--I must say, I was involved.
I can't believe this.
|
| 44:51 | We tried to lure him to the dark side.
|
| 44:54 | We took on a project years ago
when Photoshop first came out.
|
| 44:58 | We took his negatives, his prints,
we scanned them in, and we showed him this process.
|
| 45:03 | I don't think he ever touched the computer.
|
| 45:05 | I think we sort of guided him along.
|
| 45:07 | And he sort of nodded and appreciated the fact
that we were showing him that there was another way.
|
| 45:11 | Jerry: In the winter of 1996, Adobe
called me and asked me if I would create an
|
| 45:18 | image for them, using
Photoshop, to make a poster.
|
| 45:24 | And they sent with this equipment a guy, George
Jardine, who was one of their, what they call
|
| 45:31 | digital evangelists. He set the whole thing up for us,
and then I worked with him, and I had him initially
|
| 45:37 | scanning contact sheets to
see how images could be built.
|
| 45:41 | While this is all going on, it's like me
advising the guy who could do all the technical stuff,
|
| 45:47 | try to do this, try to do that, and he could do these
different things, Maggie was watching all of this.
|
| 45:54 | During the time that this three-day visit
happened originally, from the Photoshop guy,
|
| 46:00 | George Jardine, who is the evangelist, I sat
with him and with Jerry to sort of see what
|
| 46:07 | was happening, but I
didn't operate the computer.
|
| 46:09 | Then when he left, I thought well, okay, so
now I'll get out the book and check it all
|
| 46:14 | out, and I read all the stuff and figured
out the Tool palette wasn't so much to learn
|
| 46:18 | because I think it was like version 2 or 2.5,
whichever one first had layers in Photoshop.
|
| 46:25 | I immediately loved it and tried to
just learn everything I could about it.
|
| 46:30 | And the quality I could get
with this scanner was great.
|
| 46:36 | I was playing with it and having fun with
it, and I was trying different objects and
|
| 46:40 | different backgrounds and the idea that
you could change the sizes of things.
|
| 46:45 | Russ: I clearly recall the first phone call I got
from Maggie telling me, "Russ, I'm doing some
|
| 46:52 | experimenting here. I had some questions.
|
| 46:56 | Excuse me, I've got a goldfish on my
scanner flatbed." I get, what? What?
|
| 47:03 | Put the goldfish back in the bowl.
|
| 47:05 | So, she's experimenting in the early days
with flatbed scanners, and she saw the dark
|
| 47:12 | side as possibilities.
|
| 47:14 | A person in a tintype photograph that I was
never able to use before could be lifted out
|
| 47:20 | of their background and be used.
|
| 47:23 | But I couldn't see still how
I could make finished prints.
|
| 47:28 | People were not accepting
digital work as much at that time.
|
| 47:32 | It wasn't until I started to see a few other
artists doing IRIS inkjet prints. It wasn't glossy.
|
| 47:39 | It wasn't that slick shiny surface.
|
| 47:41 | It was like a whole new world, and I
just loved it the minute that I saw that.
|
| 47:51 | (music playing)
|
| 48:03 | I like sitting at my desk.
It's very comfortable.
|
| 48:07 | It's all neat and tidy,
and I have everything I need.
|
| 48:10 | And I like typing.
|
| 48:12 | I can check my email if I want to.
|
| 48:14 | I've just got like everything here that I need.
|
| 48:18 | In the darkroom, it was not fun for me;
I didn't like the chemicals and all that stuff.
|
| 48:24 | And you know, you were kind of
not able to multitask as much.
|
| 48:27 | It was just one thing I
was stuck doing in there.
|
| 48:31 | When I used to do the collages that I set
up in front of the camera, I had to make a
|
| 48:37 | decision right then, before I used my
4 x 5 film, about what was going to be in and
|
| 48:42 | what was going to be out.
|
| 48:46 | With this now in the computer,
I can make changes as I go along.
|
| 48:53 | At one point, the girl with the saw had a butterfly,
a boat, the watermelon, a pelican, and a beetle.
|
| 49:00 | And I decided that I didn't really love all
those things, and I had to kind of narrow it down.
|
| 49:04 | So, it's like building up and then
paring away is kind of my process a lot.
|
| 49:11 | One of the things that always
amazes me is the detail that I get.
|
| 49:15 | Some of the elements are scanned and some
of them are just photographed with my little
|
| 49:18 | point-and-shoot camera.
|
| 49:20 | When I photographed that watermelon, I didn't
love the image that I got of it, so the watermelon
|
| 49:25 | actually exists as a whole bunch of
different layers of the watermelon.
|
| 49:29 | In fact, the original watermelon was kind of
lopsided and was a yellow watermelon, not a red one.
|
| 49:37 | So, you never know, as you're going along,
how something's going to end up, and I like
|
| 49:43 | that aspect of working.
|
| 49:45 | I don't, you know, I don't start out with
an idea and say, I woke up and had a dream
|
| 49:49 | of a girl holding a saw and a
watermelon and now I will illustrate that.
|
| 49:52 | It never works that way for me.
|
| 49:55 | I really prefer this kind of
more organic and playful way.
|
| 49:59 | I just enjoy the fact of
interacting with the image.
|
| 50:07 | I like the idea that they have a stage-like
presence and partly using the floors that I use.
|
| 50:14 | Sometimes using curtains in
the background for images
|
| 50:16 | kind of gives you the sense that
this is a little play that's unfolding.
|
| 50:20 | There's a little drama happening here.
|
| 50:22 | And in a way, it almost reminds me of when I was a
kid and I would play with the dollhouse with toys.
|
| 50:28 | You're bringing in different little
characters and moving their furniture around and kind
|
| 50:34 | of just seeing what happens, until you
reach a point where you're happy with it.
|
| 50:38 | (music playing)
|
| 50:48 | Evon: Her work is just, in my
opinion, it's layered, it's heavy, it's dark.
|
| 51:03 | And I think she has allowed it just to open a
box of dreams, and she now feels comfortable
|
| 51:09 | to walk through it and to show
it without being threatened.
|
| 51:14 | And I think it's just provided
her a richness beyond words.
|
| 51:19 | Ted: Very few people
followed directly in Jerry's path.
|
| 51:27 | When Maggie came into it and began
working digitally, it looked different.
|
| 51:32 | And so she was able to make the art
without being typecast as one of his followers.
|
| 51:41 | Keith: She's using a twenty-first century technology
to deal, primarily, with photography's first generation.
|
| 51:53 | She's re-imagined something bigger and richer
and more personal and more symbolically resonant
|
| 52:00 | from that source image.
|
| 52:03 | Jerry: That ability, with Photoshop and the
experimentation she had been doing, the combination
|
| 52:11 | of those two created the body of work.
|
| 52:14 | Once, I think, she had the sense of that
independent spirit, that's been an ongoing thing.
|
| 52:20 | (music playing)
|
| 52:37 | (birds chirping)
|
| 52:44 | Jerry: We're definitely, every day
somehow, involved in our art and other life
|
| 52:49 | issues of maintaining the house
and the dogs and all that stuff.
|
| 52:53 | But we're basically committed to making art.
|
| 52:57 | (music playing)
|
| 53:01 | Maggie: For the most part,
we work really independently.
|
| 53:05 | A long time ago, Jerry added onto the house
where we live and added a studio, and that
|
| 53:11 | was before I lived there.
|
| 53:12 | But he added a whole separate
building that has his darkroom in it.
|
| 53:14 | And I used to share that
with him for about ten years.
|
| 53:17 | But we just have so much stuff.
|
| 53:19 | We're collecting things to use in our work.
|
| 53:23 | So, about seven or eight years ago, I guess,
we decided that instead of building another
|
| 53:29 | little studio space, just
buy a small house nearby.
|
| 53:39 | Jerry: Hey, buddy.
Are you locked up then? Yes, you are.
|
| 53:44 | You've been making art over here?
|
| 53:48 | I like the basic image of the girl, but the
stuff that you've got, the linear stuff going
|
| 53:55 | around the head, doesn't do
much for me at this point.
|
| 53:58 | It really helps me to get input from
other people whose opinions I respect.
|
| 54:03 | You know, do you like the girl
with the blue dress or the red dress?
|
| 54:07 | Or, do you like this
background or that background?
|
| 54:10 | And sometimes I listen and sometimes I don't.
|
| 54:13 | I need that kind of outside input
though, to help me make decisions.
|
| 54:27 | Jerry: I can do basic email, but then the computer
will always ask me questions I can't understand.
|
| 54:34 | That's what I don't like. Titles.
|
| 54:38 | So, this is the kind of thing she'll send me.
|
| 54:41 | So for this image, we have two titles.
|
| 54:44 | This is the semi-final version. Options.
|
| 54:48 | Nocturne or Small Boat Waiting.
|
| 54:50 | And there may be a second
version of the image. No, not there.
|
| 54:54 | And I told her I like Small Boat Waiting.
|
| 54:57 | And there's a different image she had
been working on, and I love this image.
|
| 55:01 | I think this her best new image.
It's just so bizarre.
|
| 55:04 | It's just, I don't know what about it.
|
| 55:09 | It's like, how could someone think
of that, and that saw there, amazing.
|
| 55:12 | And there was more choices here.
|
| 55:16 | The title could be The
Lesson, The Gift, The Reminder.
|
| 55:22 | And I picked--I like The Lesson.
|
| 55:27 | Image-wise, I always have
prints for her to look at.
|
| 55:32 | I don't, I can't suddenly send her a scan, so it's
usually on her way back or she's doing something.
|
| 55:37 | And I say, "I want you to look at these
things," and then I'll spread out the versions that
|
| 55:42 | I've completed. And then, you begin to realize
that there truly is more than one right answer
|
| 55:48 | as you evolve these things.
|
| 55:51 | I'm going into the studio--
my studio, not Maggie's.
|
| 56:01 | I've been in this place 25 years at least.
|
| 56:05 | I don't remember the exact date.
|
| 56:07 | These are my larger prints.
|
| 56:11 | I make a smaller number of them, but I
like to have them in the larger size.
|
| 56:16 | This is from 1982, '83, and these are matted
and hopefully ready to send off to a show.
|
| 56:24 | On some days, it just feels--it's a more
interesting day for me to just do this kind of work.
|
| 56:32 | I can have the blues playing loudly on my
stereo system and just matting a few prints,
|
| 56:37 | with the hope that someday
someone else will want them.
|
| 56:40 | Here's a floating boat, another floating boat.
|
| 56:44 | This is what people forget, that years ago,
the landscape jobs out west, they literally
|
| 56:53 | had mules carry their equipment,
but they had glass plates.
|
| 56:57 | There's stories of one mule falling down,
coming down a canyon and all the plates broke.
|
| 57:04 | It was a much more
challenging kind of thing to do.
|
| 57:08 | This is a key room.
|
| 57:11 | This is sort of where it all begins.
|
| 57:14 | I spend a lot of time out here, you know,
looking at contact sheets that represent
|
| 57:20 | everything that's on the role of film.
|
| 57:23 | And I'm collecting, in essence, pieces of
things, things that I respond to in the world.
|
| 57:29 | It's just very helpful to have them,
and not so much in the structured order.
|
| 57:35 | Like this was done in 1996.
|
| 57:37 | And I know that was done,
I think, in Ireland. Usually I know.
|
| 57:44 | The models that I've used, I usually
photograph against a white background because I could
|
| 57:48 | introduce that figure standing somewhere.
|
| 57:52 | This was photographed in 1986, in May, and I
have file numbers so I can find those negatives.
|
| 58:00 | Tthe figures jumping, these became my
flowing figures, and that was just a sheer chance.
|
| 58:07 | I had a photograph the model against a white
background, and I won't be able to find that one.
|
| 58:11 | And there were two shots left on the roll,
so I said, "Jump," so she jumped, and I got her
|
| 58:16 | jumping with flash.
|
| 58:19 | That print proof sheet existed for years,
and one day it happened to be placed, like
|
| 58:24 | this, and then there was another
proof sheet let's say like this.
|
| 58:29 | And you know, I came out and
I looked, now wait a minute.
|
| 58:32 | If I print that person horizontal, I can
have her floating above that ground there.
|
| 58:38 | So, one of my earliest pictures with the floating
figure involved a figure floating over a shore.
|
| 58:45 | I could take any two contact sheets and go
in the darkroom and make something, but the
|
| 58:51 | point is you're still trying to critically
come up with something that resonates with you.
|
| 59:00 | There are levels of understanding that you
can't articulate, that you can't describe
|
| 59:07 | in a logical, sensible, reasonable way that
have value, that they are powerful, evocative
|
| 59:15 | images that stay with you in your mind.
|
| 59:17 | And I mean that's the hope at the end of the
process that you get--begin to approach that.
|
| 59:25 | But because of the way it works mentally,
we can't think it through to that point.
|
| 59:28 | It's much more intuitive
and learning to trust the fact.
|
| 59:33 | I mean, I don't like knowing the fact that I
produce a hundred images a year and there's
|
| 59:39 | only ten that I end up at the end of the
year liking, yet at the same time, I also know
|
| 59:43 | that unless I did that hundred,
those ten aren't going to be there.
|
| 59:49 | There's a small boat, and this was photographed,
this has this like white area of water behind it.
|
| 59:56 | I drew that on there because
I got another idea for it.
|
| 00:00 | So, I could easily put that dark
cloud and put it closer above that.
|
| 00:05 | This is how I get my initial ideas.
|
| 00:06 | I'll show you something else.
|
| 00:06 | I don't know how readily you can see it.
|
| 00:11 | So, you could take this, put this like this,
and then you can actually get some sense of
|
| 00:20 | what that would look like, that lone boat.
|
| 00:22 | I could try to make a dark hole that replicates
the shape of the boat occurring within the sand.
|
| 00:30 | I don't know.
|
| 00:33 | That's the key, what I'm
saying there. I don't know.
|
| 00:35 | Once I print this, sometimes
that first thing is enough.
|
| 00:39 | I mean, there's just something special about this
boat with this dark flow, and it looks believable.
|
| 00:45 | It'll look believable in the finished print.
|
| 00:47 | And you know, where you have to be
concerned is you don't want to talk yourself out of
|
| 00:54 | doing this because it looks familiar.
|
| 00:56 | It's just, you have to accept the fact that
three days later, after you've spent time
|
| 01:01 | making these things, you might reject it because it
somehow fell below what you had hoped would happen.
|
| 01:08 | But if I don't do it, I'll keep
having it there bothering me.
|
| 01:12 | Because I do think this could go somewhere.
|
| 01:14 | I don't know where it would go,
but that would be the starting point.
|
| 01:17 | There is--it's very interactive.
|
| 01:19 | Just as Maggie's, you know, interacts with
what she seeing and what she can do with it
|
| 01:24 | and knowing the options.
|
| 01:33 | Maggie: I get inspired by objects the most:
antique photographs, odds and ends at a flea market.
|
| 01:44 | All the time in the back of my brain I'm
thinking about what I might do with this or that that
|
| 01:48 | I find and coming up with some ideas
for the next things I might work on.
|
| 01:53 | I thought I'd stop in and see if you had different
new photographs or anything down here, or other stuff.
|
| 01:59 | (music playing)
|
| 02:11 | Maggie: St. George right here. Okay.
Male speaker: It's over here.
|
| 02:16 | Maggie: Are these palms? Oh, look at that. Hm.
Male speaker: I don't know when we're going to see this palm tree.
|
| 02:26 | Maggie: Kind of neat little boat.
|
| 02:29 | I know that I'm not going to be inspired to
do something new, sometimes, unless I have new
|
| 02:34 | materials to work with.
|
| 02:36 | And the ones I like to collect usually are
daguerrotypes or ambrotypes, and the ambro-
|
| 02:42 | types are the ones that are on glass like this.
|
| 02:45 | But I just sort of gravitate toward this
particular time period and the clothing and stuff; it
|
| 02:50 | has a kinda dreamlike quality to me.
|
| 02:53 | Most of the time they kind of morph, in my
mind, into the people that I end up making
|
| 02:57 | them be in my images.
|
| 02:59 | I hardly ever know their names, and I
hardly ever know the exact dates of them.
|
| 03:03 | So, they're really separated from their own
past, and then I just sort of take them on
|
| 03:07 | as characters that I work with.
|
| 03:13 | I don't know what I'm going to use them for at
the time, but I can scan all these different
|
| 03:17 | things in and then after
the fact, play with them.
|
| 03:22 | Usually, I'll scan between five and ten
different things and play around with them.
|
| 03:29 | I have this whole drawer full of stuff here
that's like some stuff I could scan, and a
|
| 03:33 | lot of this I have scanned at
least once or twice before.
|
| 03:37 | But this is kind of like my handy drawer
of possibilities, if I need something.
|
| 03:42 | And it's not that it's
all that organized, really.
|
| 03:46 | But it's more organized, I think,
than Jerry's contact sheets are.
|
| 03:50 | So, I kind of know where things are.
|
| 03:52 | I recently decided, just opening this up,
that this little saw was interesting-looking.
|
| 03:56 | It had been part of a mish-mash of things
over here that were all really small, and
|
| 04:01 | I was looking around one day through it, and I
came upon it again and so that's how I happened
|
| 04:05 | to think, oh, you know, that
has a pretty interesting quality.
|
| 04:07 | And for a miniature thing,
it's pretty detailed.
|
| 04:09 | So, you know, I just put it right on the scanner and
tried it and right away loved the way it looked.
|
| 04:15 | So, I didn't know at the time I
was going to definitely use it.
|
| 04:19 | In fact, I was just kind of
scanning random objects that day.
|
| 04:27 | I know she's got like tons of damage
on her and stuff, but I can fix that.
|
| 04:31 | And she has really relativity sharp eyes,
and here you can even see her fingernails
|
| 04:36 | are just so perfect.
There's no blur at all.
|
| 04:38 | She must have been able to hold
very still with her hand like that.
|
| 04:42 | And a little bracelet and oh, she's great.
|
| 04:45 | I'll definitely be able
to do something with her.
|
| 04:47 | But it's going to be a long process to
try to fix her up. And that's okay.
|
| 04:55 | If I have a day where I don't really know
what else I want to work on, I might just
|
| 04:58 | sit there for the whole
day and totally fix her up.
|
| 05:01 | And then during the process of doing that,
usually I'll think about some idea for her.
|
| 05:12 | Once I'm sitting at my desk working,
I tend to come up with things.
|
| 05:15 | You know, when I'm sitting there, as I'm
doing something very routine, like retouching an
|
| 05:19 | image, I remember something from a
dream or something I've seen elsewhere.
|
| 05:25 | Then that kind of filters
into the work in some way.
|
| 05:27 | But if I'm not sitting there
at my desk, nothing can happen.
|
| 05:32 | And for Jerry he has to be
in the darkroom, working. Otherwise, nothing can happen.
|
| 05:37 | (music playing)
|
| 05:43 | Jerry: At this point I
thought this was a finished print.
|
| 05:50 | But during the night, it occurred to me,
that how would it work if instead of the chair
|
| 05:56 | occurring in the clouds here, that it
came down and emerged out of the figure?
|
| 06:01 | So, in order to do that, I have to take a
piece of paper and make a little drawing of
|
| 06:08 | where that figure falls, and then remove the
chair part, which was this part and the other
|
| 06:15 | enlarger, down to now it's
going to touch the head.
|
| 06:19 | It's a subtle difference, but I do think, from a
psychological point of view, it does alter the image.
|
| 06:28 | It's a huge change from having him see
something in the distance as opposed to having this
|
| 06:34 | grow out of his head.
|
| 06:39 | I want to try another version.
|
| 06:40 | I'll do it where I'll make the figure dark.
|
| 06:44 | This truly didn't occur to me till last
night, that--I don't know why I didn't think of having this.
|
| 06:50 | And I don't know if it's going to work,
but right now, it looks pretty interesting.
|
| 07:01 | I used to always listen to music.
I love the blues.
|
| 07:04 | And now these things get so complex that I
have to remember what I have to do at each
|
| 07:09 | enlarger, and so I don't get to play music
until I'm doing the final wash and other stuff.
|
| 07:17 | Now before, this had just one exposure like
that, but I'm going to give it several that
|
| 07:22 | will make the figure almost black.
|
| 07:27 | I can also make that chair totally black and
the figure totally black. One more there.
|
| 07:44 | It's interesting, of the few places where
they still teach darkroom photography, I've
|
| 07:49 | talked to high school teachers and said, yeah,
we have all these kids that are working with
|
| 07:53 | computers and suddenly, this magic in
the darkroom, they get--they just love it.
|
| 08:00 | So that still has that kind of quality,
but it's not a competitive sport.
|
| 08:06 | I don't like it when people think, oh,
they tell me oh, the darkroom is much better.
|
| 08:10 | Don't you think it's better?
|
| 08:11 | It's not better; it's different.
|
| 08:13 | It's my way because I've been doing it a
long time, but if I were younger, I definitely
|
| 08:19 | would be working with a computer.
|
| 08:22 | Now, what I'd like to try is that
black chair and keep the guy transparent.
|
| 08:31 | But somehow, I don't know why I'd rejected
the totally black chair, but to me, at this
|
| 08:39 | point, I like that.
|
| 08:41 | I think, you know, this is for sale.
|
| 08:46 | No, who cares.
|
| 08:47 | That's the last thing I
think about. I don't know.
|
| 08:55 | It probably works better with the black figure,
because that then becomes a continuous part of the chair.
|
| 09:04 | It looks a little hokey though, in the
way he's standing there without a shadow.
|
| 09:09 | I'm going to try one where I simply have the
black at the top and then the figure fades
|
| 09:15 | off toward the bottom.
|
| 09:18 | I could burn in that rock,
just make it a little darker.
|
| 09:22 | This area here gets a little bit too much
maybe, but there are several ways I can do this.
|
| 09:34 | This now is just printing the figure the way
it is, but if I block up here with a card--and
|
| 09:42 | this is something you just learn over the years of
having done this-- I can make those feet fade off.
|
| 09:48 | We're going to try this.
|
| 09:52 | Let's see what happens here.
|
| 09:56 | This one better be perfect.
|
| 10:01 | We interrupt the history of
photography for a special announcement.
|
| 10:05 | And that rock does look a little
darker than it is here, coming out of it.
|
| 10:12 | I could burn in the sides a little more.
|
| 10:15 | I like where the eye holds the eye
in by having like the bottom darker.
|
| 10:18 | I didn't think to do the sides.
|
| 10:20 | I'm going to have to do one more.
|
| 10:29 | Just one more, that's what they
always say when they take pictures.
|
| 10:34 | We could use this for an
Excedrin headache commercial.
|
| 10:40 | This is just a matter of darkening the edges
there, just to hold the eye toward the center.
|
| 10:49 | And then we're going to make an overkill
here a little bit for the bottom. All right.
|
| 10:56 | Now, our clouds, which, this is the one I
don't have to do anything, other than put
|
| 11:06 | it in the paper and meditate on,
why do I do this? What does it mean?
|
| 11:15 | Now, this is looking good.
|
| 11:20 | You see, we had to try
those others to get to this.
|
| 11:22 | It's not a magic bullet.
|
| 11:25 | Whether it's an authentically worthwhile
image, time will determine that, I suppose.
|
| 11:33 | But this is the kind of thing you can
only think of while you're doing it.
|
| 11:37 | That's why, you know, I always, when I taught
graduates, I mean, they'd be talking about
|
| 11:41 | things they were going to do, and I'd
say, excuse me, you've got to do it.
|
| 11:45 | You gotta physically get in there and try
these things because that's where the really
|
| 11:50 | creative process begins.
|
| 11:55 | The subtle differences are, you see the
lightness to the edge there and the darkness there.
|
| 12:00 | This is just holding the eye in so that
visually, this is where you begin to address that.
|
| 12:07 | And I darkened the whole rock
area around him. I like that.
|
| 12:12 | It's the best of the day.
|
| 12:15 | (music playing)
|
| 12:20 | On one hand, you do have feedback from
supportive friends that are close by, but you need this
|
| 12:26 | quiet time, this time where you're by yourself.
|
| 12:29 | You're doing this.
|
| 12:30 | You got to have conditions
conducive for something to happen.
|
| 12:34 | So, until I went in the darkroom and
literally started making marks on that paper, the art
|
| 12:39 | wasn't going to happen without that process.
|
| 12:44 | Maggie: You have to make
bad images to make good images.
|
| 12:49 | You know, in a way, you have to work
through making ones that you don't love.
|
| 12:54 | (music playing)
|
| 13:09 | This is something I've been working on.
|
| 13:10 | I scanned in all these beetles
that I really love from old books.
|
| 13:17 | They're old, like, 1740s
illustrations of beetles.
|
| 13:21 | And what I've been trying to do with them is work
out a way that they could be a frame for somebody.
|
| 13:29 | And I've tried a variety of different people
behind them and different things behind them.
|
| 13:34 | And I'm kinda liking a
landscapey background behind them.
|
| 13:38 | And I had these words that were in another
image that I thought I'd try here, that it
|
| 13:43 | kind of reminds me of like a long time ago when I
used to use little phrases in my photographic images.
|
| 13:48 | And so this is like, now what?
|
| 13:51 | It did have a question mark, but
I didn't like the question mark.
|
| 13:53 | But I've got the words in there,
and I'm thinking, I like that.
|
| 13:57 | I like the interaction of
the beetles with the words.
|
| 13:59 | And I like this kind of suggested landscape
background there, with just a hint of a cloud
|
| 14:05 | and a little bit of some trees.
|
| 14:08 | The problem now is, by mistake, one day when I
was turning on and off these layers, I turned
|
| 14:15 | off the beetle layer.
|
| 14:18 | And once the beetles are off, I
actually like the image better.
|
| 14:21 | So, that means this is another beetle failure,
like the beetles are going to have to get
|
| 14:26 | out of there and go into some other image.
|
| 14:28 | So, I scanned in a ton of little twigs and
I also used a ladder, which I could cut and
|
| 14:34 | paste and make the text.
|
| 14:37 | Once I got this text in, I thought well, I
kind of like it, but it's going to need more
|
| 14:43 | branches or vines or
something coming out of it.
|
| 14:46 | I don't want to make it look like it's growing
there, but I want to make it look like stuff
|
| 14:49 | people just freshly found
and cut to make this text.
|
| 14:52 | So, then I'm looking around outside the yard
and thinking, what do I have that has a good
|
| 14:59 | sort of a viney look?
|
| 15:01 | And that's why I scanned in some ferns and
a few little root pieces, thinking I could
|
| 15:06 | cut those and morph them and make them into just
little things that will come out of the text.
|
| 15:12 | And you know, I don't know what's going to
happen with this, but I mean, this I had just
|
| 15:17 | put in here and I'm not sure.
|
| 15:19 | But I'm gong to take this one little
fern and make it onto own separate layer.
|
| 15:24 | I want it to look like they're
growing on the logs. I don't know.
|
| 15:37 | Hm.
|
| 15:38 | I don't know if I'm going to like this.
|
| 15:44 | I also scanned in this little root.
|
| 15:47 | It reminds me of like a nice old tree branch.
|
| 15:50 | So, I think it could work, if I take little
bits off of it and put them here and there.
|
| 15:57 | But now that I look at it, the root
is way better than the fern pieces.
|
| 16:04 | This is more what I wanted,
just to make little, tiny bits.
|
| 16:08 | And this is something that only someone looking really,
really closely at this image will ever really see.
|
| 16:13 | Or, you know, if it's blown up to a
really large size print, they would see it.
|
| 16:17 | But I kind of like the idea that I'm just
going to have these little, tiny things there.
|
| 16:22 | Yes, this is what I wanted.
|
| 16:25 | Little, tiny things.
|
| 16:27 | And then after that, fixing up
the landscape a little bit more.
|
| 16:35 | Oh, there, I just changed that roots blend
mode to Multiply and it looked a lot better.
|
| 16:39 | Oh, I like that, now that it lines up and it's
just got little bits coming up. That is not bad.
|
| 16:47 | If I show this to Jerry, I don't know if
he'll like it, but I like it.
|
| 16:52 | Jerry: Okay. Ooh, that's not bad. I think that.
|
| 16:58 | Maggie: I don't want the
trees so close to the mountains.
|
| 17:03 | I mean I'm not saying, well, that's
not bad either, look at that, Jerry.
|
| 17:05 | The mountains go way up.
|
| 17:07 | Jerry: Your eye, you know, this area has to be.
|
| 17:11 | Maggie: There's a sheen area over
there that is not fully worked out.
|
| 17:16 | Sometimes it's better to look at it like this.
|
| 17:18 | Jerry: Yeah, that's better if you can add
that to that other version of the overall tone.
|
| 17:21 | Maggie: So, if I just put a mask on that.
|
| 17:24 | That was light coming in from the museum
window under that painting is what it was.
|
| 17:30 | Jerry: As Maggie's skill has improved, I
learned that technology that she's doing, although
|
| 17:41 | I'm jealous that I can't do it.
|
| 17:43 | So I can tell her, put that thing around there with the--
Maggie: Box, put the box.
|
| 17:47 | Jerry: Then put that box around there
so you can stretch it out down here.
|
| 17:51 | And I can say things based on what I know
she's capable of doing, but I don't know what,
|
| 17:57 | you know, it involves her remembering
4,000 layers or all that kind of stuff.
|
| 18:03 | But initially, you could just use the photo
rooms and burn that in or darken this, but
|
| 18:07 | there's so many more choices here.
|
| 18:09 | I'm aware of things she can do to change
perspective, how she can isolate things, and darken things,
|
| 18:18 | sharpen things, there's a concept.
|
| 18:19 | I can't sharpen things beyond
what they are on the negative.
|
| 18:24 | So, I have, I don't have the correct terminology, but I've
watched her do this enough and become insanely jealous.
|
| 18:32 | Maggie: You're good at
knowing what can be done.
|
| 18:36 | You just don't necessarily
know the steps to get there.
|
| 18:38 | And so, that's one thing
that's kind of frustrating.
|
| 18:40 | Sometimes when I'm trying to fix something, because
you're on to--you're telling me do A, B, C .
|
| 18:43 | And I'm like, well, I want to get A
perfect before I go on, and it takes time.
|
| 18:48 | Jerry: It is not uncommon for us to have,
where she'll want me to come look at something.
|
| 18:54 | I make suggestions, and she
constantly says, I can't do that.
|
| 18:58 | If I do it one more time
it's going to degenerate, or whatever.
|
| 19:01 | She goes on and on about this. And then.
|
| 19:04 | Maggie: I can't do it, can't do it, can't do it.
Jerry: Yeah, I can't do it.
|
| 19:06 | And then I leave, thinking, you know, hey,
I'm trying to help and then I find out that
|
| 19:11 | Jerry: she eventually does.
Maggie: A day later I do it.
|
| 19:14 | Maggie: Here's what that little baby doll image was, was this.
Jerry: Oh, God.
|
| 19:19 | Maggie: You don't like him?
|
| 19:20 | Jerry: Well, I like him, but he does,
in the silhouette, he reads as a tail.
|
| 19:21 | Maggie: That's good, right?
Jerry: No. Do you want him to have a tail? All right, whatever.
|
| 19:29 | Maggie: I mean it's more
interesting than your magazine people.
|
| 19:32 | Jerry: Now, wait a minute.
|
| 19:34 | It's not a competitive sport.
|
| 19:36 | Jerry: This image really sucks.
Maggie: Yeah.
|
| 19:40 | Jerry: I tell you, it's getting. Oh my god.
|
| 19:43 | Maggie: It's better than
your half-naked yoga man.
|
| 19:47 | Jerry: Hey, that, he's not a
silhouette. It's meditative.
|
| 19:51 | Maggie: There he is, right.
|
| 19:53 | Jerry: Because when he's back, it's like he's pointing to the sign almost.
Maggie: Mhmm.
|
| 19:59 | And you kind of can't tell if that's a tail
or if he has a backpack or what, but I sort
|
| 20:06 | Maggie: of like that about him.
Jerry: All right.
|
| 20:09 | Maggie: Go back to your own little studio.
|
| 20:11 | Jerry: All right, yeah.
|
| 20:11 | Jerry: You won't get her in the darkroom.
She used to say it smelled bad.
|
| 20:17 | Maggie: It smells like mildew in there.
|
| 20:19 | Jerry: Well, that's part of the process.
(music playing)
|
| 20:23 | Maggie: When we had a show in Korea
back in 2007, it was really the first time
|
| 20:29 | that anybody had asked us to
show the works side by side.
|
| 20:33 | Jerry: Someone had thoughtfully put
together, in the same journal, a picture by
|
| 20:38 | Maggie and a picture by me,
where we had similar elements.
|
| 20:43 | (music playing)
|
| 20:45 | Our work is so visually different.
|
| 20:48 | Mine definitely are much more surreal and
painterly and his are black-and-white classic-looking
|
| 20:54 | photographs, so it was surprising to
us how many there were that linked.
|
| 21:01 | She might need a particular kind of background,
and then I remember well, when we were in
|
| 21:06 | Ireland, I photographed that little
castle and I--you're welcome to use that.
|
| 21:10 | But it's not a conscious thing;
it's maybe like a contagious thing.
|
| 21:16 | He's been borrowing my little dollhouse furniture and
my little crumpled-up pieces of paper, small boats.
|
| 21:25 | Jerry has a number of photographs of
real boats and I've used a couple of them.
|
| 21:31 | And birds, shells, and other small objects.
|
| 21:35 | I scan them, but Jerry
photographs them on a light table.
|
| 21:39 | Keith: Both have been about making
images that operate poetically and subjectively,
|
| 21:47 | that invite viewer participation.
|
| 21:50 | The household is not just husband and wife
living together and having meals together,
|
| 21:54 | but it's living the ideas together.
|
| 21:58 | Evon: There's just such
total support for each other as artists.
|
| 22:05 | He just totally supports her.
|
| 22:07 | She totally supports him.
|
| 22:09 | It's like they think about each
other more than they do themselves.
|
| 22:14 | (music playing)
|
| 22:21 | Maggie: There are times when one or the other
of us is really doing well and feeling positive
|
| 22:26 | about an image and the other one
is struggling to get back to work.
|
| 22:31 | Jerry: For whatever reason, at certain times,
the challenge feels greater than at other
|
| 22:39 | times, in terms of taking that blank sheet
of paper, blank canvas, and having something
|
| 22:45 | of substance occur on it.
|
| 22:48 | All right, how about that?
|
| 22:54 | We just know that's the way it is.
|
| 22:57 | It's very rare that we both have had a really
good image-making day and feel really happy
|
| 23:02 | at the end of the day.
|
| 23:06 | A few times a year, we like to go away
someplace where we can really just be out in nature.
|
| 23:11 | Just, you know, 45 minutes or an hour from
our house, that we can go someplace and have
|
| 23:16 | a day and be separated from
everything is really good.
|
| 23:20 | (indecipherable speech)
|
| 23:24 | Female speaker: You're
first because it's first in line. Is that okay?
|
| 23:25 | Jerry: Yeah, because the oldest. All right.
|
| 23:28 | I don't know if I'll be taking any pictures,
but it's just an experience out of our normal
|
| 23:36 | context, out of our normal range of daily
activities, so it's refreshing.
|
| 23:42 | (water splashing)
|
| 23:52 | Civilization is being left behind.
(music playing)
|
| 24:05 | This brings you back to square one.
|
| 24:08 | (music playing)
|
| 24:10 | Maggie: Sometimes we come back with images that we
can use, background landscapes that might be useful.
|
| 24:18 | But more importantly, we just come back
refreshed and ready to sit back at the computer, for
|
| 24:23 | him to go back in the darkroom.
|
| 24:26 | (music playing)
|
| 24:34 | Jerry: I'm constantly fascinated with trees,
and Maggie and I both have a thing about that.
|
| 24:40 | You're not making major aesthetic decisions;
you're just trying to learn to authentically
|
| 24:45 | respond to the world around you, because if you
think too much, you'll talk yourself out of it.
|
| 24:52 | Maggie: I just like that one fern, kind of.
|
| 24:56 | (music playing)
|
| 25:02 | First I came in here cuz I just wanted to see
the lilies, but then I saw all these caterpillars.
|
| 25:06 | I don't know if I'll use them for anything,
but they were nice, graphic, black- and white-striped caterpillars.
|
| 25:12 | (music playing)
|
| 25:23 | Jerry: Maggie, here's a
gator. I'm not kidding. Here's a gator.
|
| 25:29 | (music playing)
|
| 25:32 | He's just come out of water, so he's all dark.
(music playing)
|
| 25:44 | The experiences you have feed into your art.
|
| 25:49 | What keeps your work cohesive is the extent to
which you are self-reflective and authentic.
|
| 25:55 | (music playing)
|
| 26:18 | Evon: We have really lived through,
experienced, and watched the end of what at
|
| 26:27 | one time was a greater phenomenon than the
computer: the fixed image on a piece of paper.
|
| 26:36 | At this moment, Jerry works in
an antique photographic process.
|
| 26:41 | Phillip: I don't think Jerry's work has ever
been more relevant or more resonant than it is today.
|
| 26:50 | Because of the digital technologies that
are available, it may be that younger artists
|
| 26:55 | who look at Jerry's work think, okay, yeah,
I could do that, in a way that artists in
|
| 26:59 | the '60s and '70s couldn't.
|
| 27:02 | But having said that, I think the material
looks really fresh to young eyes, and there's
|
| 27:08 | a whole generation, or more, of artists
who really haven't studied this work before.
|
| 27:14 | And it's not just technical;
it is artistic. It is emotional. It is expressive.
|
| 27:19 | And it's Jerry's approach to this kind of
subject matter, I think, more than his technical
|
| 27:24 | sophistication, that really
resonates with people today.
|
| 27:28 | (music playing)
|
| 27:30 | Keith Davis: Jerry began when there was no
economic incentive to make art photographs,
|
| 27:37 | and Maggie began when there was very little
economic incentive to be making computer art.
|
| 27:43 | In both cases, what we see stems from
something deeply felt and deeply personal.
|
| 27:50 | And that continues.
|
| 27:52 | Jerry: I knew that somehow this
medium had possibilities that certainly were beyond
|
| 28:00 | this portrait studio in
Detroit that I initially envisioned.
|
| 28:05 | I couldn't define them from any
other occupational point of view.
|
| 28:09 | All I knew was that this is
incredibly interesting to me.
|
| 28:12 | And I don't know what all the clues that caused
that watching that first print in the developer,
|
| 28:18 | but there was a point in which it was--I
believed it was engaging for me and it would
|
| 28:24 | sustain that kind of feeling for a long time.
|
| 28:27 | (music playing)
|
| 28:29 | Maggie Taylor: I'm very open to the idea
that we're all changeable and that I can't say
|
| 28:34 | a few years from now if I'll be doing the
exact same sort of thing that I'm doing now.
|
| 28:38 | I'm really happy with the fact that the
computer came into my life at the time that it did,
|
| 28:43 | and allowed me to change and
my work to grow in this way.
|
| 28:48 | Jerry: Edgar Weston said he defined art
as the outer expression of inner growth.
|
| 28:54 | The quote was basically, when I was young, in my early
40s, I defined art as outer expression of inner growth.
|
| 29:01 | He said, "I can't define art any
better today, but my work has changed.
|
| 29:06 | Art is not something to be
learned apart from books and rules.
|
| 29:09 | It is a living thing that
depends on full participation.
|
| 29:13 | As we grow in life, so we grow in
art, each of us in his unique way."
|
| 29:20 | (music playing)
|
| 29:31 | Keith: Jerry represents the
beginning of time, with the enlarger.
|
| 29:35 | Maggie is representing modern age, and so we
have this fusion between the two that influence
|
| 29:43 | the people here at The Annenberg.
|
| 29:46 | Male speaker: Why are we all here?
We're here because of Jerry Uelsmann.
|
| 29:51 | I believe that Photoshop may have existed,
if I didn't see Jerry's work, would I have
|
| 29:57 | gone onto Adobe, would I have helped
them make Photoshop? Would I be here?
|
| 29:59 | Would any of you be here? I don't think so.
|
| 30:03 | (music playing)
|
| 30:14 | Phillip: He has given a whole new generation
of photographers the inspiration to engage
|
| 30:21 | with experimental photography.
|
| 30:23 | What that means in the future, what kinds of
photography in coming decades, remains to be seen.
|
| 30:30 | (music playing)
|
| 30:37 | Ted: I sometimes think of the world of
artists as sort of this large balloon that's
|
| 30:42 | filled with artwork, and each artist is busy
pushing at some edge or another of that balloon
|
| 30:48 | and slowly enlarging that universe
and making it a little richer for us.
|
| 30:54 | (music playing)
|
| 30:56 | Jerry and Maggie have expanded that perimeter,
and even with all of the work they have done,
|
| 31:02 | that universe is still largely empty and
waiting to be filled with work from other artists.
|
| 31:08 | They've opened a whole new territory for us,
and now the tools increasingly exist that
|
| 31:13 | any of us can go in.
|
| 32:15 | (music playing)
|
| 32:23 | (music playing)
|
| Collapse this transcript |
