Art I'm Looking at: Ruth Asawa, Paul McCartney, Kunié Sugiura, and Richard Diebenkorn

In the past six weeks or so, I've seen some of the major shows currently on view in San Francisco, mainly the Ruth Asawa show and work by Kunié Sugiura at SF MOMA, the Paul McCartney photographs at the De Young, and a small show of prints by Richard Diebenkorn at Crown Point Press. 

The Ruth Asawa show, which runs through September 2, brings together more than 300 pieces from all phases of Asawa's career. Like many people, I have been most familiar with her hanging wire sculptures. I was largely ignorant about the details of her career, however. The show, which is roughly chronological, offers an excellent opportunity to put the wire sculptures into context and to get a sense of the range of her activity. From the earliest work in the show, mainly from her time at Black Mountain College, to the last work she did, in San Francisco, where she eventually settled and raised a family of six children with her husband, architect Albert Lanier, it is evident that she had a deep interest in and understanding of natural forms, which appear to have been a constant inspiration. 

I particularly enjoyed seeing folded paper creations, early printed works, and some exquisite botanical contour drawings in the show, as well as drawings done using Screentone on matboard. Well worth a visit.  (Photos: Top – SF MOMA, installation view. Above, Mounted Paper Fold with Horizontal Stripes, ink on paper, 1952. Below, Photocopy of Ruth Asawa's Hand, not dated, photoelectric print.)

Also on at SF MOMA is a show of work by Kunié Sugiura, an artist I had never heard of, who appears to have been active mostly as a photographer. In the show are everything from small photomontages to very large photograms, but the show features what she refersto as "photopaintings." Sugiura's photopaintings are assemblages that combine photographic images with sculptural elements. Some of these put me in mind of Robert Rauschenberg's "combines." Others suggested Rothko with their simple pairings of diffuse, flat surfaces. I thought the photopaintings rather effective. The photographic elements function simultaneously as independent images and as abstract compositional elements within the whole of each piece. 

The show will be up through September 2025. If you're heading to SF MOMA to see the Ruth Asawa show, I recommend taking in the Sugiura show as well. (Photos: Above, SF MOMA installation view; below top, Introse BP3, toned silver gelatin print, 2002; below bottom Deadend Street, photographic emulsion and acrylic paint on canvas with wood, 1978.)

The Paul McCartney photographs now on view at the De Young I found interesting for their historical value; they present an intimate look at life behind the scenes with the Beatles just as Beatlemania was taking off, but I found the show a bit disappointing. With a few exceptions, the photos are not especially fine as photographs. Those on view are almost all digital prints from the negatives rather than silver gelatin prints (and where negatives have been lost, digital prints from scans of contemporary contact sheets), which would have been more authentic, and many of the shots were poorly focused (which is not to say that all photographs must be in sharp focus to be worthwhile). They mostly read as incidental snapshots – which, I suppose, is what they are; McCartney makes no claims to art here. Finally, not all of the photos on display are by McCartney. A fair number include McCartney's image, taken not by him but with his camera handed to someone else, and a couple of the best shots in the show are by other photographers entirely. Color photos in Miami reveal McCartney responding as a tourist. That said, any Beatles fan will enjoy seeing the collection presented here. I thought the photo of John Lennon in Paris and a shot of Ringo and George, both shown below, among the better images.

When Yale University Press in association with The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and the Richard Diebenkorn Foundation, published the Richard Diebenkorn Catalog Raisonné in 2016, I acquired the set, as Diebenkorn is among my favorite artists, but I was disappointed to find that none of his many prints were included. I learned that a definitive catalog of the prints was to appear in a separate edition, and that has just appeared, almost ten years later. In honor of the publication, Crown Point Press in San Francisco (on Hawthorne St., a short walk from SF MOMA) is now doing a small show of some of the prints that Diebenkorn made at Crown Point Press. The show is small, with only about 25 pieces on the walls, but each is choice and one of the finished prints is shown alongside several proof versions, which allows a glimpse into the process of its creation. Worth a visit, but, checking the Crown Point Press website, it looks like this show may have just closed. I'd recommend calling in advance, but Crown Point Press is almost always worth a visit. 

Very close to Crown Point Press, walking along the sidewalk on Howard St., I noticed some pavement markings that looked very much like a Diebenkorn to me.  

Art I'm Looking At: SF MOMA (March 2025)

On a recent trip to San Francisco, I stopped in at SF MOMA. I had visited only about six weeks earlier, so didn't find much new, but I enjoyed seeing a show of photography on right now called "Around Group ƒ.64: Legacies and Counterhistories in Bay Area Photography." 

The short-lived but influential Group ƒ.64 was founded in 1932 by California photographers interested in photography that was sharply focused and true to the medium – photography not pretending to be something it wasn't (Edward Weston, Imogen Cunningham, and Ansel Adams were three of the eleven members). 

The impetus was a reaction to the pictorialists in vogue at the time whose aim was essentially to use photography to make images that mimicked painting, using soft focus and choosing mainly romantic subjects. The pictorialists and many early photographers were attempting to establish photography as a respectable art, a status it did not at first enjoy, by associating it with high art. The ƒ.64 Group photographers had as one of their goals a firmer footing for serious photography as well, but they chose an entirely different approach. 

The name of the group comes from ƒ.64, which is the smallest-diameter aperture setting available with most camera lenses, important in this context because the smaller the aperture used, the greater the depth of field there is – that is, the broader the range of view in an image that's in sharp focus. 

The show was a bit unfocused (no pun intended). It takes the actual Group ƒ.64 photographers as its starting point, showing work by all eleven original members, and then goes from there quite far afield. There is a section looking at the relationship between the Group's photographers and the poet Langston Hughes (a connection I was entirely unaware of). 

There is a section featuring the work of Tarrah Krajnak who does self-portraits referencing work by the Group ƒ.64 photographers. Some of her photographs are shown alongside the Group ƒ.64 photographs they were inspired by. These sections were followed by contemporary photographs with a rather tenuous connection to the rest of the show – the "counterhistories" of the show's title. I thought the earlier sections more interesting. I especially enjoyed seeing original prints by the less familiar Group ƒ.64 photographers. Posted here are a few favorites from the show, which runs through July 2025, along with one or two from the Amy Sherald show that has just closed at SF MOMA. 

 

(Above: Willard Van Dyke, Boxer's Hands, silver gelatin print, 1932; Willard Van Dyke, Funnels, silver gelatin print, 1932; Sonya Noskowiak, Spanish Bottle, silver gelatin print, 1927; Sonya Noskowiak, Industrial Section, San Francisco, silver gelatin print, 1937; Tarrah Krajnak, Self-portrait as West/as Bertha Wardell (Knees), silver gelatin print, 1927/2020; Edward Weston, Knees, silver gelatin print, 1927; Amy Sherald, Miss Everything (Unsupressed Deliverance), oil on canvas, 2014; Amy Sherald, The Rabbit in the Hat, oil on canvas, 2009)

Art I'm Making: "Curious Boy" (c. 1975)

Over the last two days, I finally got around to cleaning up my photographic darkroom (which has morphed into a wine cellar) and I think I've now got it to a state that will allow the wine and the photo equipment to co-exist. I'm looking forward to putting the equipment to use again.

While cleaning and straightening, I found the negative for this photo, which I remember having titled "Curious Boy." I made this photograph when I was 15. I vaguely recall winning an honorable mention for it in a contest. The image was made on a bus in Dayton, Ohio, c. 1975. It's on Kodak Plus-X film. At the time, I would have been using a Yashica TL-Electro. Two years later, I had graduated to an Olympus OM-2, a camera that I still have and use occasionally. 

Seeing the image now, I'm a little disappointed that the boy's face isn't more crisply focused, but this was done before auto-focus was a thing. It was a fleeting moment. The boy turned around. I lifted my camera and pushed the shutter button. I probably had only a second to adjust the focus if I had any time at all. 

Art I'm Making: Art Trails 2021

It's almost that time of year again—time for Art Trails, Sonoma County's premier open studio event. Moved up a month this year, studios will be open on two weekends in September (September 18, 19 and 25, 26) from 10:00AM to 5:00PM on each of the four days. Come see some of my recent work in person. Come for the art or just come by to say hello. I'm looking forward to it. 

 

For more of my abstract monotype collage work, visit my website. https://ctalcroft.wixsite.com/collage-site  

 

Art I'm Making: Macro Photography

I've recently become interested in local insects more than in the past because of a couple of gigs doing bird surveys on private property in the county where, in both cases, the people asking me to catalog the birds present are interested in everything—birds, wildflowers, insects. 

Photographing insects with the same long telephoto lens I use to photograph birds actually works quite well, but I thought it time to get a dedicated macro lens. Olympus makes a very highly rated macro lens (60mm, f2.8) that I was able to find fairly inexpensively used. I've only been able to go on a few outings with this new lens, but, so far, it's proved hit or miss. The extremely shallow depth of field makes it a challenge to get anything in focus—particularly critters that don't hold still. 

So far, I've had the best luck (and a great deal of luck seems to be required) with the most common of insects—honeybees and house flies. I'm hoping to capture something a little more exotic before too long. (Click on the image for a larger view.)

Miscellaneous: Fiery garden visitor

A garden visitor recently. I think this is a fiery skipper (Hylephila phyleus). These are pretty common around here, but I've never attempted to photograph one before. I got this nice, sharp shot with the camera in my iPhone. From the iPhone 6 (which I have) forward, the cameras are very good, but there are tricks that allow you to get shots like this one that people assume were made with much fancier equipment--although, if you think about it, these phones we are all so used to nowadays are actually extraordinarily capable devices. Pretty fancy, even.

Books I'm Reading: The Man Who Stopped Time

I had known that Eadweard Muybridge emigrated to the US from England and settled in California, that he had had a studio on Montgomery St. in San Francisco, that he started making his famous sequences of animals and people in motion in association with Leyland Standford, and that Muybridge had murdered a man. However, I knew very few details. Brian Clegg's The Man Who Stopped Time (Joseph Henry Press, 2007), subtitled The Illuminating Story of Eadweard Muybridge–Pioneer Photographer, Father of the Motion Picture, Murderer, fills in a lot of those details and adds much else I was unaware of.

The first part of the book focuses on the murder and the trial that followed. Muybridge shot and killed his wife's lover. He made no attempt to escape afterwards or deny that he had done it. He was ultimately acquitted, the jury persuaded by his lawyer who appealed more to moral law than actual law, arguing that what Muybridge had done was understandable. Muybridge appears to have deeply loved his wife and to have been heartbroken.

In detailing Muybridge's work for Stanford at Palo Alto, on mostly empty land that would later become the Stanford University campus, we get the story of how a track was laid out with banks of cameras that used electrically activated shutters to stop motion, and a look at Muybridge the entrepreneur later tourning the country with his photographs and a complex mechanism, the zoöpraxiscope for projecting a series of them in quick succession to create what were the first moving pictures, even if what we today think of as movies relied on a strip of celluloid for projecting images in series. Author Clegg makes a strong case for Muybridge as the father of the motion picture, pointing out that his work pre-dates Edison's and that Muybridge essentially was operating the first commercial motion picture theater at the Chicago World's Columbian Exposition of 1893, even if his "movies" were very short by today's standards. He suggests that Edison's talent for self-promotion has played a large role in creating the impression that Edison made the first moving pictures. There is much, too, about Muybridge's later work at the University of Pennsylvania doing more extensive motion photography with improved techniques; and the bulk of the photos we know today of animals and people in motion were made in Pennsylvania, not in California for Stanford.

Unexpectedly, The Man Who Stopped Time almost incidentally provides one of the best overviews of the history of the development of still photography I've ever read in the course of explaining Muybridge's work. The book was worth reading just for that. But, as I say, this book has many merits: It touches on Muybridge's roots in England, his work as a still photographer and as a photographer of motion, the above-mentioned history of still photography technology, on Muybridge's trial for murder and the incident itself, on the stage coach accident that nearly killed Muybridge, and on Muybridge's falling out with Stanford, his financial troubles, and how Muybridge's reputation became unfairly sullied by confusion about his central role in the creation of the motion photographs and the tools and techniques used to make them, mostly reflecting jealousy and misinformation. Recommended.

Miscellaneous: Fire at Notre Dame de Paris

Tragedy in Paris, at the cathedral, but it sounds like the bulk of the structure is unharmed and the damaged portions can be rebuilt. Here's to the hope that that is true.

Shown is "Notre Dame, Paris—Grim Guardian" circa 1930, by Warren R. Laity, my grandfather. Silver-gelatin print. Image size: 9 x 13 inches. My grandfather was a photographer beginning to get an international reputation just as he tragically died of complications during minor surgery at the age of 46, in 1936. We have about 60 of his exhibition prints, mostly of European architectural subjects, as that was his specialty. Many of them are plastered on the back with exhibition stickers from all over Europe and the US. This image has exhibition stickers on the reverse from New York and Budapest.

He taught art history at a women's college in NJ that later became part of Rutgers. On his summers off, he did classes on transatlantic cruise liners to pay his way to Europe for research. He also spent a couple of summers (1922 and 1923) traveling around Europe by motorcycle and photographing while writing articles for the Harley-Davidson magazine.

Art I'm Making: Cyanotype progress

Under the heading of "For What it's Worth": I've been working with the new Christina Z. Anderson Cyanotype book, following a couple of months of experimentation on my own (but with the generous help of another member here who happens to live nearby), focused on classic cyanotype and Arches Platine paper.

Looking at the book, I was very impressed by the work by Eugene Starobinskiy (for example, on page 117). Saying to myself "That's the kind of print I want to make!" and reading his comment saying his best-looking prints have been done on Canson XL Watercolor paper (in a 9 x 12 tablet), I decided to start a new calibration using this paper. It has one huge advantage right off the bat--it's much cheaper than Arches Platine. Also, I don't like that the Arches Platine sheets always come with a sticker on them that ruins part of the already expensive paper. On the downside, the Canson paper is less absorbent, making it a little harder to coat evenly. The blues are slightly different, but hard to characterize. The Arches Platine blue is a little fatter, a little more velvety, but I don't dislike the color of the Canson XL.

The Canson seems to give me a much better range of tones. I used Christine's method to determine a base exposure (I hope I've done it right), based on the information on pages 49-53. I've modified my standard processing slightly, by increasing the acidity of the developing water--going from one tbsp of vinegar/quart to 1 tbsp/500ml, essentially doubling the vinegar--although that's still a comparatively small amount.

The first cyanotype I posted here, and my first real effort was appealing and I put it up with some enthusiasm because I was simply pleased to got an interesting image of any kind (the image of the Transamerica Pyramid in San Francisco). However, the shadows are blocked up in the original print (on the left) and the mid-tones are muddy. Changing to the Canson XL Watercolor paper with the above-noted modification immediately produced a much better result. So, I think I will move forward trying to create a curve for this new paper and development routine. Information about the two prints is given below the images (I hope it's readable). Both were exposed in a beautiful UV-light box my brother made for me. Identical negative. Both classic cyanotype formula from Bostick and Sullivan. Double coated. Naturally, these are images of images, so approximations, but I've made an effort to tweak them so that the on-screen versions look as close as possible to the real prints--although they may look rather different on your monitor. Still, I hope the comparison is of some interest to anyone considering these papers. 

[Having posted this on the Facebook cyanotype page I unexpectedly triggered a long thread with many people much more experience than me. They've convinced me that the Canson is not a good choice for serious work because it has buffers in it that react badly with cyanotype chemistry over time. Although it works very well, it's not archival. Back to the Arches Platine.]

Books I'm Reading: On Photography

Having just read Susan Sontag's Against Interpretation and Other Essays, I felt inspired to finally read her collection called On Photography. I read an old Delta paperback edition (1978—apparently the first paperback edition) that I picked up used somewhere ages ago; although I thought I had a newer edition somewhere. No matter, the content is the same, although newer editions may have worthwhile ancillary material attached. It's a shame that Sontag didn't live long enough to add thoughts in the age of smartphones, Facebook, and Instagram.

This was much easier going than Against Interpretation—not because it is somehow lacking in depth, breadth, or rigor of thought—but simply because the subject matter is so much more familiar to me. I'm able to immediately see in my mind virtually all the images she mentions, none of which are shown in the text (I wonder if there's an illustrated edition?). I know the photographers she mentions. I know most of the history. But this is not about the history of photography or about the work of specific photographers except as useful for the purposes of supporting an argument.

The essays (six of them, although together they read as a single narrative) are mostly about the function of photography within human culture, and virtually every page has something worthwhile to say about the subject. Sontag talks about how photography relates to painting, to travel and tourism, about the way photography levels all events by transforming them into physical records, about ethical issues faced by documentary photographers and war correspondents, about the paradoxical way photographs can shock by exposing what is normally unseen while at the same time anesthetizing us to the shocking through repeated exposure, and about the way photography has come to shape the way we view and understand environments, both natural and man made.

Ultimately, she suggests that photography has usurped reality--that we have become more comfortable relating to images of the world than to the world itself. She was prescient. She had this insight when images were more pervasive than they'd ever been yet still far fewer and far more difficult to create than they are today. In 1977, making a photographic image usually involved film  sent out for processing. There was typically a lag of at least several hours--sometimes as long as a week--between composing a photograph and seeing it. Polaroid cameras were available, but even at the height of their popularity and availability, most images were not made with instant cameras (and a Polaroid image took several minutes to appear). Today, virtually any phone handset can produce an image in seconds and that image can be made visible to hundreds of millions of viewers just as quickly. What would Sontag have had to say?

[A few days later I found the more recent edition I was pretty sure I had (Picador, 1990). The text is identical to the text of the version I read. No illustrations have been added, and there is no additional content. ]

Art I'm Making: My Second First Cyanotype

A few weeks back, I posted here my "first cyanotype." Being new to this process, I was pleased with an image that had faults that I was willing to overlook in the excitement of getting a moderately successful image. Here, I post what I think I will be able to look back on as my real first cyanotype in the sense that this one actually looks the way I envisioned it from the outset.

I've been working to create a curve that works for me. However, this image worked a little by accident, I believe. That is, I think the curve I'm using now just happens to work well with this particular image. Using the same curve on other images and on a test target has been disappointing. I'm still have trouble getting a range of tones at the highlight end of things.

For the moment, though, I'll take what I can get. This is repeatable because I have the successful negative, but my work will continue until I get a curve that works more generally.

For those who like technical details, this is a print using the traditional cyanotype formula on Arches Platine, double coated, exposed for 15 minutes under an artificial UV light source. Developed in water with one tbsp of vinegar per quart for one minute under constant, vigorous agitation (which seems to be the key to keeping the highlights from getting stained) and then for 30 seconds in water with one tbsp of hydrogen peroxide added per quart of water. Washed ten minutes. The bird is a Great-tailed Grackle (Quiscalus mexicanus), photographed in Santa Rosa, California (digital capture, negative made on Pictorico transparency film). The Great-tailed Grackle is a comparatively unusual bird here, but it is becoming more common as it appears to be extending its range into our area of Northern California from its traditional range, mostly in the southwestern and south-central US and Mexico.

Art I'm Making: First Cyanotypes (November 25, 2018)

The cyanotype process has always fascinated me, but it's only been in the past couple of months that I've started investigating it in earnest, thanks to my brother, who built me an amazing UV exposure box, and to Bob Cornelis, who has been extraordinarily generous with his time and advice.

After many trials, I printed my first actual attempts at making photos yesterday. Some tweaking is still in order (the midtones are greyer than I would like), but generally speaking, I'm quite pleased at having achieved crisp whites and dark, velvety blacks--or blues, I should say. 

This view of the Transamerica Pyramid, in San Francisco, was done on Arches Platine paper using the traditional cyanotype formula, coating the paper twice. 15-minute exposure. Processed in water with one tablespoon vinegar/quart of water for one minute. Then rinsed in a bath of one tablespoon hydrogen peroxide/quart of water for 30 seconds. Washed 15 minutes. Off to a good start. :) 

[My very first cyanotype was actually more than two-and-a-half years ago. Here's a link to a comment about that attempt.] 

[And I've made some progress since posting this ]

Art I'm Making: Art Trails 2018

Art I'm Looking At: The Cult of the Machine at the De Young

Charles Sheeler, American Landscape, 1930
Museum of modern Art, New York

The Cult of the Machine, now on view at the De Young Museum in San Francisco, although promoted as a look at Precisionism in general (and it is that), is a veritable Charles Sheeler retrospective. It includes some of his most important works—photographs, paintings, and drawings. It was a pleasure to see in person so many Sheelers I've long admired in reproduction, particularly the paintings he made from some of his well known photographs of Ford's River Rouge plant, and his Upper Deck (1929) and Rolling Power (1939)*.

Installation view:
Shadows cast by Shaker furniture

There is less familiar work here, too—by Sheeler, by other familiar names, and by names new to me. Besides paintings, photographs, and objects of design from the period during which the Precisionist style flourished in the United States (roughly 1915 to 1945), there is a display of Shaker-designed household items that echo in their simplicity the stylized geometries of Precisionism. The venue is also showing the brief 1921 film Sheeler made with Paul Strand, Manhatta, that looks at a day in Manhattan, inspired by Whitman's Leaves of Grass, and a looping clip from Chaplin's Modern Times (1936). The Shaker items are artfully backlit, their shadows projected onto a screen. When viewed from behind, the shadows look like one of Sheeler's cityscapes.

Strand is represented by several well-known images such as Wall Street (1915) and The Court (1924). Several of Sheeler's photographs of the Doylestown Quaker meeting house are here, as are painted and drawn versions of views he photographed there, allowing side-by-side comparisons. There are a couple of good Paul Outerbridge photos and work from photographers less familiar, such as Anton Bruehl. His Untitled, a 1929 shot of part of a Cadillac engine is striking. Some of the photographs of my grandfather, Warren R. Laity, would have been right at home here.

Anton Bruehl, Untitled, 1929
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

Warren R. Laity, Mail Plane, circa 1930
(Not in show), Private collection

Gerald Murphy, Razor, 1924
Dallas Museum of Art                               

Also striking is a 1924 painting entitled Razor by Gerald Murphy that immediately brings to mind paintings from the same period by Stuart Davis that draw on advertising imagery and bright colors for their impact, works that anticipate Pop Art. There is nothing by Davis in the show and I was surprised to see only one piece by Charles Demuth—the name, along with Sheeler's, that comes to mind most readily when thinking of Precisonism. But most of the artists associated with Precisionism are here, including Joseph Stella, George Ault, Niles Spencer, Morton Shamberg, and Edmund Lewandowski. George Ault's Bright Light at Russell's Corners (1946, Smithsonian American Art Museum), a moody night scene dominated by eerily lit barns, and Lewandowski's small Furnace No. 5, are particularly attractive.

Francis Criss, Waterfront, c. 1940
Detroit Institute of Art

New to me were the painters Francis Criss, Elsie Driggs, Bumpei Usui, and Peter Blume. Criss's highly stylized Waterfront (c. 1940) reduces a waterfront industrial scene to its geometrical essence, using starkly contrasting saturated colors, a lamppost vestige of an earlier age, and a bold yellow-gold frame to heighten the effect. The frame is one of many in the show that are beautiful in their own right. Usui's 1924 New York cityscape 14th Street is a strong piece, with its cubes, cylinders, and pyramidal forms in a style reminiscent of some of the WPA frescoes of the period (and the show includes a painting by John Langley Howard, among those who contributed to the 1934 Coit Tower murals, a WPA project). There are also a couple of paintings by Georgia O'Keefe likely to seem surprisingly unlike her to most viewers. They differ markedly from the style she's best known for. One is a view of barns at Lake George. Another is a New York cityscape done from an elevated perspective—from the window of a high-rise apartment she shared there with husband Alfred Stieglitz.

Charles Sheeler, Upper Deck, 1929
Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum

Precisionism was an extension of cubism in its attention to the underlying geometry of things, in its interest in architectonic form, an extension of Futurism in its obsession with the modern and with machinery, but I'm not sure how coherent it was—if it was recognized at the time as a movement at all. Perhaps underscoring that is the fact that "precisionism" was only one of several contemporary terms used to describe the style. The painters were sometimes known as "the immaculates" or they were referred to as "modern classicists." "Precisionism" is the name that has stuck. Names aside, the work on display is quintessentially of its time.

Bumpei Usui, 14th Street, 1924
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

"Precisionism" was a label given to the American expression of anxieties common between the world wars in rapidly industrializing societies globally. The paintings and photographs of the period reflect a fascination with machinery, with scale, with industrial might, but they also betray a deep, veiled fear. The clean lines, the simplified forms, and the tendency to eliminate human beings from angular cityscapes all suggest a need to slow things down, to examine reality in an artificial, controlled way, to tame things before they spin out of control. As the Cult of the Machine wall texts point out, these anxieties are familiar today, with technology rapidly outpacing our ability to adjust to it. To express the angst caused by forward leaps of technology, artists of the early twentieth century turned to depicting the physical manifestations of rapid change—to depicting bridges, dams, turbines, factories, propellers, ocean liners—large, tangible objects that overwhelm, things built not on a human scale. Artists of the early twenty-first century perhaps have a right to feel even more overwhelmed and anxious, handicapped as they are by the seemingly insubstantial nature of the technology that today drives so much change. Our technological marvels do not have an oppressive physical presence. They are not built on a grand scale. They are miniaturized and hidden behind sleek, portable steel and glass packages, hidden inside phones and tablets. They are barely visible. There is nothing to see.

The Cult of the Machine is on view at the De Young Museum (50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Dr, San Francisco, CA 94118) through August 12, 2018.

*It's worth noting that, in addition to the River Rouge pieces, both Upper Deck and Rolling Power were originally done as photographs (the Upper Deck photo is in the De Young show). There are many other examples of Sheeler working in a highly realistic style from photographs. I'm not aware of Sheeler being considered anticipatory to Photorealism, but surely he was, even if he usually took stylistic liberties a strict photorealist might not have.

Charles Sheeler, Rolling Power (1939)
Smith College Museum of Art

Art I'm Looking At: Robert Rauschenberg and Walker Evans at SF MOMA

Robert Rauschenberg, Collection (1954/1955)
San Francisco Museum of Art

I recently saw the Robert Rauschenberg retrospective now on view at SF MOMA (November 18, 2017 through March 25, 2018). I think the most striking thing about the show is the impression it gives that Rauschenberg was, essentially, a collage artist. Often his work actually was collage (or assemblage, the three-dimensional version of collage), but even when he was not making collages or assemblages, his sensibility remained that of a collagist to a remarkable degree; it was his instinct to juxtapose fragments of things.

Robert Rauschenberg, From
34 Illustrations for Dante's Inferno (1958-1960)

He came into his own at the height of abstract expressionism and matured as pop art emerged, but, looking at his work, he seems to be of neither movement. He worked large, but I don't feel he was concerned about the idea of the heroic painter. Although he incorporated commercial images and everyday objects into his work, I doubt his intent was to comment on consumerism and consumption or on how the media represent the world. He was an aesthete. What seems revolutionary was that he succeeded in created so much visually engaging work without using pretty materials. Up close, many of the pieces are messy (sometimes made out of actual trash), but ultimately they always seem to be about composition. Radical approaches and materials never trump composition.

Walker Evans
Garage in Southern City Outskirts, Atlanta Georgia (1936, printed 1972)

I also saw the large Walker Evans retrospective (closed February 4)—one of those shows that puts the best known work of an artist into perspective, teaching that the most familiar work is not necessarily the most representative. I had seen mostly Walker's familiar depression-era photographs before, but not a lot else, I realize now.

Walker Evans
Tin Snips by J. Wiss and Sons Co. (1955)

The exhibition looked at Walker's career from the perspective of his interest in the everyday, his implicit rejection of the formal, highly aestheticized conception of photography in the work of photographers like Stieglitz. Walker was interested in the things around him and in revealing them as they were. I think it was Ansel Adams who once said you don't "take" a photograph, you "make" a photograph, emphasizing the control of the photographer over the viewed world that resides in the finished image; the photographer is seen as a manipulator of the seen world, but Walker would have rejected that idea. His interest was in recording the present, taking what was there for what it was. A comparison with Atget is an obvious one, but I wasn't aware that Walker was conscious of and inspired by Atget. Apparently he was. Walker had seen and studied Atget's photographs (several of which appear in the show near similar views by Evans). I especially enjoyed a series of photographs of everyday objects shot almost as if intended for a sales catalog, such as the tin snips shown here. An enlightening show that was well worth seeing.  

Art I'm Looking at: Lusha Nelson at the Philbrook Museum

I wish I could go to see this show of photographs by a photographer I'd never heard of before—Lusha Nelson. The Philbrook Museum, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, is doing a retrospective of Nelson's work. Apparently, he died quite young—which is a shame, as his career appears to have been off to a very good start, judging from the photographs included. The exhibition catalog is online and worth a look. (Photograph of actress Jean Arther (c. 1935) by Lusha Nelson.)

Books I'm reading: Capturing the Light and The Edge of Vision

I've just finished Capturing the Light: The Birth of Photography, a True Story of Genius and Rivalry, by Roger Watson and Helen Rappaport (St. Martin's Press, 2013). Refreshingly well written, this was a quick read because reading it was a pleasure. Authors Watson and Rappaport give an overview of the history of the invention of photography by focusing on the main characters in the story, Henry Fox Talbot and Louis Daguerre, as well as on a number of other characters less well known. Nicephore Niepce, the inventor of the first non-ephemeral (if largely impractical) photographic process was familiar (I stumbled across his gravesite in a churchyard in France years ago), but others such as Frederick Scott Archer (inventor of the wet collodion process) were less familiar. The book gives a good overview of how Daguerre in France and Talbot in England arrived at two very different processes that allowed images to be captured permanently.

Lyle Rexer's The Edge of Vision: The Rise of Abstraction in Photography (Aperture, 2013, paperback edition) looks at the history of abstraction in photography, beginning with some of the photograms of Henry Fox Talbot and ending with contemporary works that stretch the definition of photography beyond the breaking point. In between, there is much of interest to see and the book seems more valuable for the many illustrations it includes than for the text, although there is some interesting back material included in an appendix, mostly writing about photography by critics and some of the artists whose works are included in the book. This is a good reference that suggests what photography is capable of when released from its traditional role as an objective recorder of the world around us (although many would argue that photography never has been that at all).

Art I'm Looking At: New Show Opening on The Art Wall at Shige Sushi—Contemporary Bay Area Photography

I'm pleased to announce the next show on The Art Wall at Shige Sushi: A show of recent work by nine accomplished Bay Area photographers, ranging from artists with decades-long careers and international reputations to a Santa Rosa Junior College student, and including work made using digital, analog, and alternative processes.

The show will run from February 28, 2017 to April 30, 2017. Opening reception: Monday, March 6, 2017 from 5:30 to 7:30. Come have a glass of wine and meet the artists.

Work by: Holly Anderson, Bill Baldewicz, Bob Cornelis, Barbara Elliott, Janis Crystal Lipzin, Maureen Lomasney, Michael Maggid, Austin Reynolds, and Colin Talcroft.

Miscellaneous: Photographs in Birds of the Pacific Northwest

I'm pleased to announce that some of my bird photographs were chosen for use in a new field guide. Birds of the Pacific Northwest (Timber Press, authors John Shewey and Tim Blount) is scheduled for release in March 2017. It is part of the Timber Press Field Guide Series. In particular, a clear, diagnostic shot of a Sharp-tailed Sandpiper is hard to find, it seems. My photo of the bird that appeared at Shollenberger Park in October 2011 is among the dozen or so of my photos included in the new book.

Art I'm Making: Art Trails 2016--Opening Reception Tonight at the Sebastopol Center For the Arts (September 23, 2016)

If you're local to the San Francisco Bay Area, you can see my work in person during the upcoming Sonoma County Art Trails Open Studios event, October 8, 9 and October 15, and 16. I'm studio No. 141 this year.

OPENING RECEPTION for the preview show at The Sebastopol Center for the Arts is tonight, September 23, 6:00PM to 8:00PM. http://sonomacountyarttrails.org for more information.

To see more of my work, visit my website at http://ctalcroft.wixsite.com/collage-site