With a Trace
Photographs
of Absence

With a Trace
Photographs of Absence

A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.
- William Wordsworth, excerpt from Tintern Abbey, 1798

Spiritual content and abstract imagery may seem contrary to the use of photography as a tool for reproducing concrete things in the real world. The artists in With a Trace utilize the science of analog (non-digital) photography—light sensitive material, chemicals and light—to depict such intangibles as memory, dreams and emotion. They draw upon the life-giving forces of water, light and air not only as subject matter but as the material components of their processes.

The photographs in With a Trace were created between 1939 and 2010. The artists, spanning several generations, use a wide range of photographic processes—including many that do not involve a camera—to render their subjects. Many share interests in psychology, philosophy, religion, physics and astronomy, evidence of which seeps into their images. Often deeply personal yet universally accessible, the images are as remarkable for their spiritual content as for what is visually absent. They contain the presence of something unseen: life, death, energy, beauty, love.

With A Trace: Photographs of Absence was organized by the Akron Art Museum and made possible by a grant from Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation.

Photographic Techniques in With a Trace

Guest

Christopher Bucklow

British, born 1957, Manchester, England; lives London

Guest. (P.S.) 25,000 solar images, 1995
Cibachrome print
39 1/8 x 29 5/8 in.
Collection of the Akron Art Museum, Gift of William S. Lipscomb 2001.31

Seeking to record the sun in the shape of a human, Bucklow describes his process: "I draw around the shadow of someone I have dreamed of. Then I transfer that silhouette onto aluminum foil and fill it with about 25,000 pinhole apertures. On a sunny day I place that foil onto my 40 x 60 inch camera and expose a sheet of Cibachrome paper to the sun. The paper gets developed and that is the work...The thousands of images of the sun's disc are the only photographic part of my process."

Bucklow considers his Guest series to be an extended self-portrait. "I believe everyone in your dreams represents a psychological aspect of yourself." He attempts to expose the invisible forces of life's vital spark. "The figures are porous, they breathe," he states, "they are open to the world."

About the artist

Having studied art history in the 1970s, Bucklow worked as a curator at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London throughout the 1980s before pursuing a career as an artist. Bucklow worked in the paintings department at the Victoria & Albert, where he conducted research on late eighteenth-century romanticism. He later did research in the museum’s photography department. He also became interested in astronomy, physics, and the artwork of William Blake (British, 1757–1827). 

Bucklow’s early conceptual artworks were inspired by nature and plant forms. He created paintings, drawings and video works. An accomplished writer, his work is also informed by an interest in Jungian psychology. Bucklow’s experimentation with photography led to his Guest series of solar pinhole photographs, for which he is best known. Much of the artist’s work is autobiographical in nature, taking on broad philosophical questions about the nature of the self in relation to the world. “The project–my life–has been a regrouping of all these split areas, he states. “Forms I have been, Forms that live in me now, and Forms I desire to become.”

Bucklow’s work has been exhibited around the globe and is included in such major public collections as the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY; the Museum of Modern Art, NY; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Reflection

Harry Callahan

American, born 1912, Detroit; died 2013, Atlanta

Water Reflection, Bass Rocks, Massachusetts, 1978
Dye transfer print
7 1/4 x 7 1/8 in.
Collection of the Akron Art Museum, Gift of Dr. Stephen Nicholas 2009.155

About the artist

Self-taught, Harry Callahan began taking photographs as a hobby at age twenty-six but went on to become one of the most influential American artists and teachers of the medium. Acknowledged for his innovative contributions to the development of art photography, Callahan spent six decades examining the camera’s formal and expressive possibilities.

Eschewing dramatic subject matter in favor of more banal subjects and scenes, he succeeded in teasing out and uncovering the beauty in the everyday with his lucid, unsentimental vision. Much of Callahan’s photography captured scenes from his personal life and experience. Three themes dominate his art: his wife, Eleanor; urban life and architecture; and the natural landscape. Callahan used Eleanor to represent woman as beloved, mother and symbol of nature.  Sensual and adoring but rarely idealizing, his images of her body adhered to Callahan’s belief in the camera’s role as a recorder of fact. 

When shooting urban and natural environments, the artist freely experimented with abstraction and in-camera manipulation, particularly multiple exposures.  City life is shown to be crowded and hectic yet isolating.  Nature is often seen close up, so that single stalks against a blank background become graphic rather than documentary images.  In such works Callahan, like many painters of his time, acknowledges the flatness of the surface on which the image appears.

Harry Callahan left behind 100,000 negatives and over 10,000 proof prints. The Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona maintains Callahan’s photographic archives. His work has been exhibited extensively throughout the world and is included in such collections as that of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; the Museum of Modern Art, NY; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Centre Pompidou, Paris, among others. Callahan was awarded the Akron Art Museum’s first Knight Purchase Prize for Photographic Media in 1991.

Neon Lights

Harry Callahan

American, born 1912, Detroit; died 2013, Atlanta

Neon Lights, Chicago, 1946
Dye transfer print; Long Exposure
8 13/16 x 13 5/8 in.
Collection of the Akron Art Museum, Gift of Soraya Betterton 2006.77

Callahan believed in photographing intuitively. Throughout his lengthy career, he experimented with and innovated numerous photographic techniques. In Neon Lights, Chicago, he moved the camera during a long exposure to capture the energy and vibrancy of the city.

About the artist

Self-taught, Harry Callahan began taking photographs as a hobby at age twenty-six but went on to become one of the most influential American artists and teachers of the medium. Acknowledged for his innovative contributions to the development of art photography, Callahan spent six decades examining the camera’s formal and expressive possibilities.

Eschewing dramatic subject matter in favor of more banal subjects and scenes, he succeeded in teasing out and uncovering the beauty in the everyday with his lucid, unsentimental vision. Much of Callahan’s photography captured scenes from his personal life and experience. Three themes dominate his art: his wife, Eleanor; urban life and architecture; and the natural landscape. Callahan used Eleanor to represent woman as beloved, mother and symbol of nature.  Sensual and adoring but rarely idealizing, his images of her body adhered to Callahan’s belief in the camera’s role as a recorder of fact. 

When shooting urban and natural environments, the artist freely experimented with abstraction and in-camera manipulation, particularly multiple exposures.  City life is shown to be crowded and hectic yet isolating.  Nature is often seen close up, so that single stalks against a blank background become graphic rather than documentary images.  In such works Callahan, like many painters of his time, acknowledges the flatness of the surface on which the image appears.

Harry Callahan left behind 100,000 negatives and over 10,000 proof prints. The Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona maintains Callahan’s photographic archives. His work has been exhibited extensively throughout the world and is included in such collections as that of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; the Museum of Modern Art, NY; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Centre Pompidou, Paris, among others. Callahan was awarded the Akron Art Museum’s first Knight Purchase Prize for Photographic Media in 1991.

Positive Form #15

Margaret De Patta

American, born 1903, Tacoma, Washington; died 1964, Oakland, California

Positive Form #15, Squiggles with Black, 1939
Gelatin silver print ; Photogram, Multiple Exposures
10 x 8 in.
Collection of the Akron Art Museum, Purchased with funds from Mrs. Beatrice K. McDowell 1996.9

About the artist

A key figure in the studio jewelry movement, De Patta was dedicated to the ideals of Bauhaus design and the modern art principles of abstraction and constructivism, which are evident in her jewelry as well as in her photography. She studied painting and sculpture at the California School of Fine Arts and at the Arts Students League in New York, where she was exposed to the work of the European avant-garde. De Patta became interested in making jewelry when she could not find a wedding band that suited the modernist tastes she had developed during her studies. She soon gave up painting to devote herself entirely to jewelry making. For De Patta, jewelry design shared many of the same concerns as modern architecture and sculpture, as both involved “space, form, tension, organic structure, scale, texture, interpenetration, superimposition, and economy of means.”

De Patta learned about photography during a summer course at Mills College in Oakland taught by the founding director of the Chicago School of Design, Hungarian artist László Moholy-Nagy (1895 –1946) who was a former member of the German Bauhaus and a renowned teacher and innovator in the fields of photography and Constructivist sculpture. Eager to expand her understanding of modernist theories and learn new artistic techniques, in 1941 De Patta traveled to Chicago to study with Moholy-Nagy, who had a profound impact on her artistic vision and inspired her use of the photogram technique to collapse three-dimensional forms into flat images.

In line with Bauhaus ideals, De Patta later sought to produce jewelry that made high design affordable and accessible to average people. Her work is included in the collections of the Oakland Museum of California; the Museum of Arts and Design, NY; The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Art Institute of Chicago; and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, among others.

Portrait of Margaret De Patta, c. 1955 © Barbara Cannon Myers

Cfaal (Mb RGB)

Jessica Eaton

Canadian, born 1977, Regina, Saskatchewan; lives Montreal, Quebec

cfaal (mb RGB) 21, 2010
Archival pigment print; Multiple Exposures
39 ½ x 31 ½ in.
Collection of Fred and Laura Ruth Bidwell; Image © Jessica Eaton, Courtesy of M+B.

Working with layers in Photoshop (virtually superimposing images and/or text) inspired Eaton to attempt to create an analog photograph in layers. Using colored filters, she photographs wooden cubes that are painted black, white or gray. She makes multiple exposures on 4 x 5 film, changing cubes and filters each time. With regard to her process, Eaton states, "It [only] seems complicated because we've... automated [photography] to the point where you don't actually have to consider how anything works."

Eaton feels that her photographs acknowledge "how incredibly limited our ability to perceive the world is." She considers our lack of sensory mechanisms to see the colors her photographs produce with the naked eye to be a metaphor for our inability to comprehend the extent of the universe.

About the artist

Jessica Eaton is a process-oriented photographer whose subject is the medium of photography itself. While she sometimes sketches out ideas digitally and even derives inspiration from digital effects available in Photoshop, Eaton exploits the basic components of analog photography to produce her images. Many of her photographs are made by taking multiple in-camera exposures of objects such as wooden cubes or plastics that she manipulates. She uses a variety of color- and polarizing filters, which produce painterly effects ranging from hard-edge geometric abstraction to something resembling expressionistic brushstrokes. Eaton strives to push photography beyond what we are capable of seeing with the naked eye. She states, “…[analog photography] doesn’t have to be intrinsically bound to the visible world. It is full of possibility.” When questioned about the complexity of her process, Eaton responds, “I’m often using the most base elements of things. It seems complicated because we’ve increasingly automated [photography] to the point where you don’t actually have to consider how anything works.”

Eaton received a BFA in photography from the Emily Carr Institute in Vancouver, British Columbia. She has exhibited her work across the United States and Canada and has received numerous grants and awards including the Hyères Photography Jury Grand Prize (France, 2012) and a Canada Council for the Arts grant (2011).

My Ghost

Adam Fuss

British, born 1961, London, England; lives New York City

From the series My Ghost [large smoke], 1999
Gelatin silver print; Photogram
63 x 45 in.
Collection of the Akron Art Museum, Knight Purchase Fund for Photographic Media 2003.47

According to Fuss, the series My Ghost represents "a personal expression of loss and an attempt to express in visual terms an emotional presence of a human that is now absent."

In response to the My Ghost series, Neville Wakefield wrote, "It is not news that we live in a world where beauty is inexplicably and suddenly ruined. When the lives that we presume to be ours disappear without trace, comprehension unravels backwards through corridors of sadness and confusion leading us to places where we may never have wanted to be, but must now make our own. Love may sometimes endure, but all that is solid around it melts into air."

This photogram was made by capturing smoke between light sensitive paper and a light source.

About the artist

Raised in England and Australia, Fuss began his career as a photography apprentice at an Australian advertising agency in 1980.  After moving to New York City, he gained critical attention for his experiments with pinhole cameras and photograms, which produced haunting images that speak to the alchemy involved in the photographic process.  Throughout his life, Fuss has maintained an intense reverence for and fascination with nature and life cycles, claiming that “making pictures allowed me the possibility of a spiritual life.” Photograms of water droplets, smoke, flowers, christening gowns and birds captured in flight take on mystical and ephemeral tones. He is also known for reviving the laborious nineteenth-century daguerreotype technique. 

Fuss has shown his work nationally and internationally, including solo exhibitions at the Akron Art Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; MA, and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, TX. The Mapfre Foundation, Madrid, mounted a comprehensive survey of Fuss’ work in January, 2011.His work is included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY, among many others. Fuss was awarded the Akron Art Museum’s Knight Purchase Prize for Photographic Media in 2002.

Ark

Adam Fuss

British, born 1961, London, England; lives New York City

Ark, 2004
Daguerreotype; Photogram, Daguerreotype
11 x 14 in.
Collection of Fred and Laura Ruth Bidwell; Image courtesy Cheim & Read, New York

To make Ark, Fuss used the nineteenth-century daguerreotype process to make a photogram. He flicked a drop of water onto the surface of a clear, still pool floating over a light-sensitized polished copper plate. The tiny disturbance created a series of concentric circles, the plate recording the transmission of energy as the ripples expanded outward. The plate was exposed to light, then treated in the darkroom with heated mercury vapors to bring out the image.

The title Ark was inspired by ancient Eastern myths of the great flood and the Moon Goddess, in which Noah carried the animals over the flood in a moon boat (ark relates to arc, or crescent). Hindus speak of the moon carrying the souls of the dead over water to the sun to live a redeemed life. In this way, Fuss's wave embodies the entire life cycle.

About the artist

Raised in England and Australia, Fuss began his career as a photography apprentice at an Australian advertising agency in 1980.  After moving to New York City, he gained critical attention for his experiments with pinhole cameras and photograms, which produced haunting images that speak to the alchemy involved in the photographic process.  Throughout his life, Fuss has maintained an intense reverence for and fascination with nature and life cycles, claiming that “making pictures allowed me the possibility of a spiritual life.” Photograms of water droplets, smoke, flowers, christening gowns and birds captured in flight take on mystical and ephemeral tones. He is also known for reviving the laborious nineteenth-century daguerreotype technique. 

Fuss has shown his work nationally and internationally, including solo exhibitions at the Akron Art Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; MA, and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, TX. The Mapfre Foundation, Madrid, mounted a comprehensive survey of Fuss’ work in January, 2011.His work is included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY, among many others. Fuss was awarded the Akron Art Museum’s Knight Purchase Prize for Photographic Media in 2002.

Mask

Lotte Jacobi

Polish, born 1896, Toruń, Poland; died 1990, Deering, New Hampshire

Mask, 1946
Palladium print; Photogram
8 5/8 x 7 1/2 in.
Collection of the Akron Art Museum, Gift of the Stephen White Gallery of Photography, Inc. 1988.10 g

Best known for her portraits of famous people, Jacobi also experimented with abstraction. In the darkroom, she used a flashlight diffused by clear plastic or another sheer material to "paint" light directly onto photographic paper.

About the artist

Johanna Alexandra “Lotte” Jacobi grew up in West Prussia (now Poland), assisting in her father’s photographic studio from the age of twelve. Soon after moving to Berlin in 1921, Jacobi began studying film at the University of Munich while also attending the Bavarian State Academy of Photography.  She eventually became a highly successful portrait photographer in Berlin, but the majority of her work from this period was lost when her Jewish heritage and leftist politics forced her to flee Berlin for New York City in 1935 following Adolf Hitler’s rise to power. 

Jacobi began experimenting with photographic processes in New York in the 1940s, which led her to begin using a flashlight diffused by translucent plastic to “draw” abstract images onto photo-sensitive paper.  Several of these photographs, dubbed photogenics, were exhibited in group exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1948 and 1951.

Jacobi continued to make portraits while living in New York City and later New Hampshire, capturing key cultural figures such as Marc Chagall, W.E.B. DuBois, Albert Einstein, Robert Frost, Käthe Kollwitz, Thomas Mann, Eleanor Roosevelt, J.D. Salinger and Alfred Stieglitz, among many others. 

Sunburned GSP#206

Chris McCaw

American, born 1971, Daly City, California; lives Pacifica, CA

Sunburned GSP#206 (Mojave/Full Day), 2008
Gelatin silver paper negatives, triptych; Long Exposure
8 x 10 in. each, 10 x 24 in. overall
Collection of Fred and Laura Ruth Bidwell

McCaw constructs his own large-format cameras equipped with oversized aerial lenses designed to admit a maximum amount of light. Instead of conventional film, he uses sheets of photo paper. Exposing the paper from fifteen minutes to twenty-four hours allows the lens to concentrate the heat of the sun into a small, inflammatory dot. As the sun travels across the sky, the hot spot moves across the paper, burning lines and cutting through the surface like a welder's torch slicing through steel.

The photographs are a record written by light of a specific place on earth over a specific duration of time. The sun's life-endowing and destructive energies are equally registered.

About the artist

Chris McCaw, who began developing his own photographs at age thirteen, initially took up photography as a hobby. Before earning a BFA at the Academy of Art College in San Francisco, California in 1995, McCaw was self-taught, working primarily with a fisheye lens to document the skateboarding, zine and punk scenes of the late 1980s. In 1993, he discovered his passion for large-format cameras and the platinum/palladium printing process, which have become important elements of his practice.

The Sunburn series was the result of an accidental discovery when the artist failed to close the shutter after a night-time exposure before the intense light of the rising sun literally burned the film. McCaw then began experimenting with intentionally burning film and then with burning paper negatives. He explains that with paper negatives, “the evidence of the scorching is right there front and center, and the solarized image becomes a positive….” McCaw views his process as a kind of collaboration between artist and subject, since the sun’s energy actively alters the final product. He adds, “My favorite part is watching smoke come out of the camera during the exposure and the faint smell of roasted marshmallows as the gelatin cooks!”

McCaw’s work has been published extensively and exhibited throughout the United States at such institutions as the George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film, Rochester, New York; Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, Winston-Salem, North Carolina; Houston Center for Photography, Texas; Museum of Photographic Arts of San Diego, California; Center for Photography at Woodstock, New York; and SF Camerawork, San Francisco, among others. McCaw was recently the recipient of an Andy Warhol Foundation/ Southern Exposure Alternative Exposure Grant and an Andy Warhol Foundation/ SF Camerawork New Works Grant. 

Portrait of Chris McCaw with one of his military aerial reconnaissance lens used for the Sunburn series, 4"x5" polariod, 2008 © Chuck Katz

Sunburned GSP#255

Chris McCaw

American, born 1971, Daly City, California; lives Pacifica, CA

Sunburned GSP#255 (Santa Cruz Mountains/Fog), 2008
Gelatin silver paper negative; Long Exposure
20 x 24 in.
Collection of Fred and Laura Ruth Bidwell

About the artist

Chris McCaw, who began developing his own photographs at age thirteen, initially took up photography as a hobby. Before earning a BFA at the Academy of Art College in San Francisco, California in 1995, McCaw was self-taught, working primarily with a fisheye lens to document the skateboarding, zine and punk scenes of the late 1980s. In 1993, he discovered his passion for large-format cameras and the platinum/palladium printing process, which have become important elements of his practice.

The Sunburn series was the result of an accidental discovery when the artist failed to close the shutter after a night-time exposure before the intense light of the rising sun literally burned the film. McCaw then began experimenting with intentionally burning film and then with burning paper negatives. He explains that with paper negatives, “the evidence of the scorching is right there front and center, and the solarized image becomes a positive….” McCaw views his process as a kind of collaboration between artist and subject, since the sun’s energy actively alters the final product. He adds, “My favorite part is watching smoke come out of the camera during the exposure and the faint smell of roasted marshmallows as the gelatin cooks!”

McCaw’s work has been published extensively and exhibited throughout the United States at such institutions as the George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film, Rochester, New York; Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, Winston-Salem, North Carolina; Houston Center for Photography, Texas; Museum of Photographic Arts of San Diego, California; Center for Photography at Woodstock, New York; and SF Camerawork, San Francisco, among others. McCaw was recently the recipient of an Andy Warhol Foundation/ Southern Exposure Alternative Exposure Grant and an Andy Warhol Foundation/ SF Camerawork New Works Grant. 

Portrait of Chris McCaw with one of his military aerial reconnaissance lens used for the Sunburn series, 4"x5" polariod, 2008 © Chuck Katz

Memory of Dog Epilogue

Daido Moriyama

Japanese, born 1938, Ikeda, Osaka; lives Tokyo

Inu No Kioko Shusho (Memory of Dog Epilogue), 2001
Gelatin silver print
60 x 40 in.
Collection of the Akron Art Museum, Knight Purchase Fund for Photographic Media 2009.107

The title for the Memory of Dog series came about after Moriyama became known for a menacing image of a stray dog that he photographed in 1971. Returning to the town of his birth, of which he had no memory, he described, "…the figure I cast during that time, roaming around town and on the back streets, carrying my camera, appeared in others' eyes very much like a stray dog…. I began to produce the series around the central idea of memory."

Moriyama annotated his images with deeply emotional and poetic essays. He recounts, "There are a number of cocoons of thin light stretching into the distance, the when and where or which of remain indistinct, just as if they were spots of the lamplight of memory, within which the silhouette of the nights I have passed can just be perceived, dimly transparent."

About the artist

A central figure in Japanese photography in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Moriyama is known for his grainy black and white images depicting the transformation of life in post-World War II Japan. Initially trained as a graphic designer, he began studying photography at age twenty-one and moved to Tokyo in 1961, where he got a job assisting renowned photographer Eikoh Hosoe.  

Reflecting the feverish, jarring period of change in post-war Japanese culture, Moriyama adopted a snapshot aesthetic, shooting from odd angles and on the fly, even from moving vehicles. Although taken with a still camera, his images seem like frames from a motion picture. Moriyama’s early photographs focused on the seamy, neglected aspects of urban life. Later, he gloried in contrasting the luridness, frenzied pace, claustrophobia and pressures of urban life with close-ups of sensual delights—a sunflower swaying in a sunny breeze or a perfect apple waiting for the first bite—and with metaphorical images, such as the delicate fraying edges of a decaying, blood red rose. Moriyama is a master of evocation rather than depiction, the glimpse rather than the gaze.  

Moriyama’s work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and The Centre Pompidou, Paris, among others. He has had solo exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; The Fondation Cartier pour l'Art Contemporain, Paris; The Fotomuseum, Winterthur, Switzerland; The Folkwang, Essen, Germany; and the Metropolitan Museum of Photography, Tokyo. Moriyama was awarded the Akron Art Museum’s Knight Purchase Prize for Photographic Media in 2008.

Photograph by Alfredo Jaar, courtesy of Daido Moriyama Photo Foundation

Dupont Velour Black

Alison Rossiter

American, born 1953, Jackson, Mississippi; lives New York City

Dupont Velour Black, Expired February 1953, processed 2011 , 2011
Photogram
8 x 10 in.
Collection of Fred and Laura Ruth Bidwell; Image © Alison Rossiter / Courtesy of Stephen Bulger Gallery

Seeming to conjure images out of thin air, Rossiter experiments with the interaction between direct light sources and vintage gelatin silver paper. Once developed, the paper stock - with expiration dates as early as 1909-reveals evidence of physical damage caused by light leaks, mold and fingerprints that it has sustained over the years. "The latent photographic traces emerge when I process the expired sheets of paper... I am using... my darkroom [tools]...to coax images out of these long forgotten papers," Rossiter explains. Among her techniques, she dips the paper in developer, pours developer across and pools it on the paper's surface, allowing it to find its own shape. Embracing the unpredictability of her practice, she states, "No other process provides the same possibility of chance."

About the artist

Alison Rossiter’s photographs are created without a camera on expired vintage photo paper. The artist experiments with gelatin silver papers she collects, such as Eastman Royal Bromide, which expired in 1919, each of which possesses unique qualities depending on its color, surface, condition and age. Drawing on her experience working in the photography conservation lab at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rossiter reacts to these variables and manipulates the interaction of paper and developer by hand, paying tribute to the intrinsic qualities of photographic materials and reintroducing unpredictability into a process that is now commonly digitized.

Rossiter attended the Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, New York; and Banff Centre School of Fine Art, Banff, Alberta, Canada. Her photographs are in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Minneapolis Institute of Arts; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Center for Creative Photography, Tucson; and the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, among others. Her work has been exhibited at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the National Gallery of Canada, SITE Santa Fe, the Whyte Museum, Banff, among other institutions. Her work has been published in the New York Times's T magazine and elsewhere.

Defender Carbon Argo

Alison Rossiter

American, born 1953, Jackson, Mississippi; lives New York City

Defender Carbon Argo, Expiration August 1908, processed 2009, 2009
Photogram; Photogram
7 x 3 1/2 in.
Collection of Fred and Laura Ruth Bidwell; Image © Alison Rossiter / Courtesy of Stephen Bulger Gallery

About the artist

Alison Rossiter’s photographs are created without a camera on expired vintage photo paper. The artist experiments with gelatin silver papers she collects, such as Eastman Royal Bromide, which expired in 1919, each of which possesses unique qualities depending on its color, surface, condition and age. Drawing on her experience working in the photography conservation lab at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rossiter reacts to these variables and manipulates the interaction of paper and developer by hand, paying tribute to the intrinsic qualities of photographic materials and reintroducing unpredictability into a process that is now commonly digitized.

Rossiter attended the Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, New York; and Banff Centre School of Fine Art, Banff, Alberta, Canada. Her photographs are in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Minneapolis Institute of Arts; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Center for Creative Photography, Tucson; and the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, among others. Her work has been exhibited at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the National Gallery of Canada, SITE Santa Fe, the Whyte Museum, Banff, among other institutions. Her work has been published in the New York Times's T magazine and elsewhere.

Light Horse/ Dark Horse

Alison Rossiter

American, born 1953, Jackson, Mississippi; lives New York City

Light Horse/Dark Horse (From Eadweard Muybridge's Horses Running, Sallie G.), 2003
Photogram; Photogram
20 x 16 in.
Collection of Fred and Laura Ruth Bidwell; Image © Alison Rossiter / Courtesy of Stephen Bulger Gallery

This image was achieved by drawing with light, a method similar to that used by Lotte Jacobi in her abstract photograms. Rossiter attempts to replicate a horse that nineteenth-century British photographer Eadweard Muybridge captured in his pioneering studies of animal locomotion.

About the artist

Alison Rossiter’s photographs are created without a camera on expired vintage photo paper. The artist experiments with gelatin silver papers she collects, such as Eastman Royal Bromide, which expired in 1919, each of which possesses unique qualities depending on its color, surface, condition and age. Drawing on her experience working in the photography conservation lab at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rossiter reacts to these variables and manipulates the interaction of paper and developer by hand, paying tribute to the intrinsic qualities of photographic materials and reintroducing unpredictability into a process that is now commonly digitized.

Rossiter attended the Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, New York; and Banff Centre School of Fine Art, Banff, Alberta, Canada. Her photographs are in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Minneapolis Institute of Arts; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Center for Creative Photography, Tucson; and the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, among others. Her work has been exhibited at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the National Gallery of Canada, SITE Santa Fe, the Whyte Museum, Banff, among other institutions. Her work has been published in the New York Times's T magazine and elsewhere.

Bay of Sagami

Hiroshi Sugimoto

Japanese, born 1948, Tokyo; lives Tokyo and New York City

Bay of Sagami, Atami , 1997
Selenium toned gelatin silver print
16 5/8 x 21 1/4 in.
Collection of the Akron Art Museum, Knight Purchase Fund for Photographic Media 1998.25

In making his Seascape series, Sugimoto pondered, "What would be the most unchanged scene on the surface of the earth? Can someone today view a scene just as primitive man might have? Although the land is forever changing its form, the sea, I thought, is immutable. Thus began my travels back through time to the ancient seas of the world."

About the artist

Sugimoto captures the intangible, ephemeral and absent in his conceptual photographs. He often concentrates on a single subject for a prolonged period, resulting in a series of related images. Seascapes, movie theaters, architecture, highly detailed images of wax portraits, Buddhist sculptures and natural history dioramas are among the subjects he has explored. Among his movie theater images, Sugimoto photographed the Akron Civic Theatre on South Main Street—an image that is included in the Akron Art Museum’s collection. In 1980, the artist began his Seascape series, which was inspired by the question, “what would be the most unchanged scene on the surface of the earth?” Looking at his work encourages reflection on the nature of time, space and memory.

Sugimoto studied economics at Saint Paul’s University in Tokyo, Japan in 1970. After traveling through the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc countries, Sugimoto moved to the United States, where he earned a BFA from the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles, California in 1972. In 1974, he moved to New York City and became in 1995 one of the only living photographers to have a solo show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. The Akron Art Museum awarded Sugimoto the Knight Purchase Prize for Photographic Media in 1997 and featured his work in a solo show the following year.

In addition to his numerous awards, grants and fellowships, Sugimoto’s work is included in the collections of the Tate Gallery, London; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and the Metropolitan Museum, NY, among many others. In 2006, a mid career retrospective was organized by the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C. and the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo.

Bay of Sagami

Hiroshi Sugimoto

Japanese, born 1948, Tokyo; lives Tokyo and New York City

Bay of Sagami, Atami, 1997
Gelatin silver print
17 x 21 in.
Collection of Fred and Laura Ruth Bidwell; Image © Hiroshi Sugimoto, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

"My first view of the ocean came as an awakening...I spied it from a Tokaido Line Train, the seascape passing from left to right...The horizon line where the azure sea met the brilliant sky was razor sharp, like a samurai sword's blade. Captivated by this startling yet oddly familiar scene, I felt I was gazing on a primordial landscape. The experience left an indelible mark on me...Every time I view the sea, I feel a calming sense of security, as if visiting my ancestral home."

About the artist

Sugimoto captures the intangible, ephemeral and absent in his conceptual photographs. He often concentrates on a single subject for a prolonged period, resulting in a series of related images. Seascapes, movie theaters, architecture, highly detailed images of wax portraits, Buddhist sculptures and natural history dioramas are among the subjects he has explored. Among his movie theater images, Sugimoto photographed the Akron Civic Theatre on South Main Street—an image that is included in the Akron Art Museum’s collection. In 1980, the artist began his Seascape series, which was inspired by the question, “what would be the most unchanged scene on the surface of the earth?” Looking at his work encourages reflection on the nature of time, space and memory.

Sugimoto studied economics at Saint Paul’s University in Tokyo, Japan in 1970. After traveling through the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc countries, Sugimoto moved to the United States, where he earned a BFA from the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles, California in 1972. In 1974, he moved to New York City and became in 1995 one of the only living photographers to have a solo show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. The Akron Art Museum awarded Sugimoto the Knight Purchase Prize for Photographic Media in 1997 and featured his work in a solo show the following year.

In addition to his numerous awards, grants and fellowships, Sugimoto’s work is included in the collections of the Tate Gallery, London; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and the Metropolitan Museum, NY, among many others. In 2006, a mid career retrospective was organized by the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C. and the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo.

Beginnings

Minor White

American, born 1908, Minneapolis, Minnesota; died 1976, Boston, Massachusetts

Beginnings, Rochester, New York, 1962
Gelatin silver print
11 7/8 in. x 9 in.
Collection of the Akron Art Museum, Purchased with funds from the National Endowment for the Arts and the L. L. Bottsford Estate Fund 1975.17 h

White wrote extensively and sustained dialogues with fellow photographers such as Ansel Adams about the spiritual aspects of photography. "...From time to time various images in front of my eyes lift themselves up and beckon to me-I approach at their command-and make the exposure, sometimes reluctantly, but always with such a complete projection of my mental state onto the object that it seems as if the object commanded and not myself. At this intensity I photograph. The result is a record of an experience between myself and the object. The object may be a cloud, a door, a rock, a person, a situation."

About the artist

An innovative artist, a teacher who influenced a generation of photographers, a curator and an editor, Minor White’s impact on the medium of photography has been extensive. His technically masterful photographs are notable examples of spirituality and metaphor in photography. 

After studying Botany and English in his native Minnesota, White began work as a photographer under the Works Progress Administration in Portland, Oregon. He served in WWII, then moved to New York City to study Art History and Aesthetics at Columbia University. During this time he met many influential art photographers, including Ansel Adams, Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen. White was particularly affected by Stieglitz’s concept of “equivalents,” developed in a series of images of clouds and skies, which relied deeply on the use of metaphor and sequence. White was also influenced by poetry and Zen philosophy. His photographs reflect the combination of Steiglitz’s conceptual ideas with technical lessons from Adams and Edward Weston.

From 1946–1953, White was instrumental in developing the department of fine art photography at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco, the first of its kind in the United States. White dedicated much of his professional life to teaching photography in San Francisco as well as at the Rochester Institute of Technology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, leaving his mark on many students over more than two collective decades. White co-founded the influential photography magazine Aperture in 1952 and served as its editor until a year before his death. He also edited Image, a magazine published by George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, while he worked there as a curator in the mid-1950s. White’s work has been widely published and is held in many major art collections.

Photo © Abe Frajndlich 1976/2013