Description:
Two black and white photographs of a rural landscape one above the other surrounded by black borders. The horizon and field below are the same in both images but the sky with it's drifting clouds are different in each photograph.
Label Text:
Exhibition Label, 40 Years / 40 Artists, January 22–March 8, 2015:
I made the negatives for these photographs in 1995.
I was thinking about the horizon, its inescapable presence in the landscapes I grew up in and its diminished importance in my experience of interior New England, where I lived at the time. I wondered whether it might be possible to make work that was about the horizon and nothing else. Simultaneously I was also convincing myself that it was impossible to make an uninteresting picture of clouds, even unaccompanied by the portentous rumblings of an Alfred Stieglitz. Where better to test these speculations than the rolling plains of North Texas where I grew up?
The form the work took served two purposes: repetition of the line of the horizon might serve to insist on its primacy in the multitude of facts gathered by the lens, like going over it repeatedly with a soft pencil; the arbitrary interval of ten minutes would insure that pictorial considerations could play no part in the exposure of the second negative.
It took a while to figure out what the final realization of the piece ought to look like, then a good while longer for the technology to catch up with the image in my mind, then an inordinate amount of time to actually complete the process. Three different commercial entities were involved, all of which involved delays. My own life wasn’t standing still. By the time the silver prints were being produced this past summer, I was seeing them in dreams. When I saw them mounted and on the wall, I was pleased but a little appalled that it had been sixteen years since I had the idea to make them. - Frank Gohlke
Tags:
agriculture; landscapes; exterior; rural Link to share this object record:
https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=UM+2014.24 |
