| The awareness of works of art as objects has not fared well among art historians in recent years, but I’d like to think that it shows signs of life in the world of galleries and collecting, and occasionally in museums. Any admirer or buyer of Chris Ofili must appreciate the material differences between metallic lamé and elephant dung, just as only the most uneducated beginning collector of photography must be unaware of the commercial if not the aesthetic qualities of a vintage print. Fine art photographers, especially today, in the early years of digital photography, are keenly experimenting with new papers and inks in their efforts to make their images come alive as objects. What’s more, gelatine silver, die transfer, platinum/palladium, and carbro, to name only a few, are all actively pursued in their respective niches, large or small. Now that inkjet printing has become the workhorse of the photographic industry, in fact, gelatine sliver printers should enjoy a certain sense of liberation. Paul Taylor, whose magnificent exhibition is about to close at the Catherine Dianich Gallery in Brattleboro, is a telling example. After receiving his MFA from RISD in 1986, he first established himself as a printer, specifically in the old but never obsolete process of photogravure, before photography itself began to reassert itself among his passions.
Taylor’s keen sensitivity to the qualities of the photograph as object are apparent everywhere in his current exhibition, which covers a range of the subjects and printing techniques which have occupied him over the past six years. Even the simple but handsomely designed gallery list reflects this concern. While photogravure, the medium for which he is widely recognized as one of the world master, is well represented by appropriate compositions, most of the works are gelatin silver prints, either contact printed or enlarged, mostly from 8 x 10 collodion wet-plate negatives. The enlargements are on the whole truly enormous, wall-commanding prints, generously matted in heavy black frames—hardly the sort of print John Szarkowski had in mind when, in his introduction to the catalogue of his exhibition Photography until Now, he voiced his preference for prints that one could hold in the hand. Indeed, Szarkowski’s statement reinforced my own suspicion of inflated print sizes. Whatever impression they might make at first glance usually fades by the time one has left the gallery. Taylor’s compositions, on the other hand, are entirely the opposite. Whether they are from his series of views of the Connecticut River, a sufficiently familiar sort of environment, or of the exotic cave monasteries of Cappadocia, his images can effectively command a large sheet. Basically straightforward in their confrontation of the subject, hardly different from documentary photography, they are also richly expressive in tonality and complex in observation. In the Connecticut River set, we have the opportunity to compare enlargements and contacts of similar images. It is striking how effective the compositions are in both formats, although in fundamentally differing ways.
The large front space at the Catherine Dianich Gallery is dominated by imposing enlargements of Taylor’s 2003 views of Cappadocia, and everything else is displayed in separate groups: the 2006 square-format studies of rock doves in flight, the 2005 photogravures of Byzantine wall markings, the 2002 views of the Connecticut River landscape, and finally three small poetic studies of the sun itself from 2001. Those are the dates of the prints, in any case; in his flyer note, Taylor states that the images “were begun in 2002,” implying that these inherently diverse modes of vision developed simultaneously. The visionary images of the solar disc, reified through the plastic aberrations of the wet-plate, reflect a meditative strain, which is equally present in the haunting river views, the fleeting patterns of the rock doves in flight, and the imposing forms of the Cappadocian cave-dwellings, carved from excrescences of the Earth itself. The photographs of the patterns scratched on the soot-coated walls by the medieval monks are in the same other-worldly spirit, ennobled by the perfect harmony of subject, image, and the medium of photogravure, and its support, buff tissue paper floated on its mount, all edges exposed, so that we can savor its full texture. (Excuse the old-fashioned word, but craft is, I believe, ennobling.)
Photogravure, a process of making multiple impressions of a photographic image through intaglio printing, was first developed by the pioneers of photography themselves. Nicéphore Niépce and Fox Talbot both experimented with it. Like digital printers today, who have gone back to inks and pigments to make their prints, they were wrestling with problems of consistency and permanence. The elegant, finely nuanced photogravures typical of the medium at its best were not possible until Karl Klíc’s innovations of the 1870’s, and the great works in it are associated with names like Peter Henry Emerson, Alfred Stieglitz, Alvin Langdon Coburn and Paul Strand, whose work spanned the Gilded Age and the Depression. The appeal of these rich, permanent prints has never died out, and Paul Taylor is hardly alone as a worker in the medium, but his high reputation in the field was eloquently supported by these astonishing objects. For more, visit the site of Taylor’s Renaissance Press, which has worked with artists like Duane Michels, Aaron Siskind, Louise Bourgeois, and Carrie Mae Weems. The site includes an excellent illustrated demonstration of the process.
Taylor’s photogravures, which mediate between the antiquity of the earth itself, the medieval monks, his chosen nineteenth century medium, and our own time, are entirely contemporary in appearance and spirit. Paul Taylor, in spite of appearances, eschews archaism, either in printing or in image capture. While his use of the wet collodion process relies on its inherent irregularities—the stains and reticulations which a Watkins or a Brady would have striven to avoid—to create an archaic impression, which is only a means, not a mode of expression, he prints the negatives on modern gelatin silver printing paper, which allows him the greatest possible tonal range, including rich, deep blacks, which evoke a shadowy sense of mystery, as well as grounding the viewer in the present.
In his note, Taylor acknowledges the patronage and hospitality of an American resident in Turkey who invited him to spend a month in Cappadocia, and he has returned twice, absorbing local history and atmosphere on each visit. Once again, the combination of the wet-plate negative, modern enlargement printing (Watkins’ grand prospects of Yosemite were contact printed from huge glass plates.), and Taylor’s unique visualization have created what should become the classic views of these bizarre landscapes. The rock-cut churches and monasteries of Cappadocia were in a sense popularized by the architect Spiro Kostof in his 1972 book, Caves of God: the Monastic Environment of Byzantine Cappadocia, in which photographs were extended by line drawings. They owe their existence to the soft volcanic rock of the region. Over time the wind eroded the Cappadocian valleys into conical protuberances which were easily hollowed out into dwellings, churches, and monasteries. Most of them date from Byzantine or post-Byzantine times, peaking between the 9th and 11th centuries. They were made by Christian Greeks, who were established in the area as early as the second century A.D. and continued their work until the 13th century. Arab invasions in the 8th and 9th century had already depopulated the region somewhat, but it was only the arrival of the Turks that put an end to the “building,” although the Greek Christians lived on there for centuries. The strange conical and phallic forms of Cappadocia are fascinating in themselves, but Paul Taylor’s vision has made them uniquely present, marking a new phase in our experience of these dream-like landscapes.
What’s best is that this is honest photography. Taylor uses the best qualities of the art to make distant and familiar places present for us. His hard-won technique, which he must love obsessively if he has mastered it to the extent he has, vanishes behind the subject-matter and the mood it expresses. We are seduced by what we see on the paper, and through this we find ourselves able to travel with him.
|
