New takes on the old: Alison Rossiter

Rossiter, Gevaert Gevaluxe Papier Velours, expired. ca. 1930s, processed 2014, from the series Latent

Alison is very comfortable in uncomplicated surroundings: the vintage photographic papers she is known for, a basic darkroom set-up of trays, standard chemicals.  Her Manhattan studio is light and airy; along one wall a cage of shelves houses finished work, experiments, work-in-progress, neatly catalogued in rising ranks of exhibition boxes.  In another area, around a corner, she keeps old papers awaiting the right time or inspiration; a whiff reaches you of the musty trace of departed photographers.  She points to a pack of Leigrano, probably pre-war, with stains on it, and smiles.  The stains are its history; more will be drawn out later.  Her work tables beyond are covered in thin white paper, prepared expressly as if for a quiet party, perhaps of one: the paper is bare, there's nothing on it, you hesitate even to set your notebook on it, and she doesn't invite you to do so either.  You feel an unspoken decorum, severely followed.  Then, as you sit across from her on a folding chair, she warms up by trying out stories on you, tales of the early days of the Velox Company maybe, smiling and laughing easily.  She entrances you the way her pictures do and have done for years, in that sensuous and crisply bookish way you like.

Her preoccupation is photographic papers, from their earliest appearance near the end of the nineteenth century up to the 1970s, with even later ones sometimes piqueing her interest such as Tura Excellent, a paper that at one time rivalled Leigrano in esteem, in Europe anyway.   At this stage, on the occasion of her new show at the Yossi Milo Gallery, it won't be necessary once again to describe in detail her method, it has been well covered in the press and on this blog.  In brief she acquires papers at auction or distress sales, opens the box under safelight, develops, fixes and dries it, and looks at what's there.  Or she may test a part of a sheet by exposure to light before developing, to see how the blacks look.  Time, atmospheric contaminants, microscopic life, spills, light seepage, all take their toll in ways large and small.  The paper becomes a record of these events and of the human intensity or frailty behind them, in essence a sort of meditation on that history, in which Rossiter, by her judgment and compassion, her choices of selection - by her art - is participant.

Rossiter, Nepera Chemical Company Carbon Velox, shipped Nov 8 1897, processed 2014

Yet along with a methodology that would not be out of place in a quality control lab there is another, savvier side to her program: the choices of what to expose, of what to save and show.  Her newest work, while still at least nominally based on the chance discoveries lurking in expired paper, exploits this forthrightly.  She hoists and hinges together groups of pictures, where a dipped black edge on one is matched to a dipped black edge on another, to achieve a strong, clean, highly graphic effect.  The Haloid Military series is an example of it.

Rossiter, Haloid Military, expired October 1957, processed 2015

Installation view, Yossi Milo Gallery, 2015

My colleague Rich Turnbull in a 2010 comment noticed this tendency, which in the present show, though not dominant, has grown in scale and purpose.  He called it the 'reinstatement of the hand' into the work and the distinction is useful.  Some purists may bemoan it, others not.  To those who have come late to Alison's work, we should remind them that at one time she was drawing images of horses with a light pen and making photograms of books.  A true darkroom buff, she is entitled to be curious and have fun, wherever that may lead.  The common thread is her totally uncommon elegance (and her deadpan humor).

Here's a picture at the Bulger Gallery in Toronto, from her Book Project series of 2004.  You should look at them all - Darwin, Ovid, Ruskin.  It tells you a lot about what she's reading too, not a bad choice.

Rossiter, The Wisdom of Confucius, 2004

Despite all we've said, I admit I'm still partial to her revelations of what the old papers have to say to us, their little explosions of uncanny beauty when Alison pulls a sheet from her tray, the elaboration of processes as natural as the turning of the earth.  This week marks the birthday (and so I'm reminded) of another great cameraless artist, Anna Atkins, who did similar work, taking pains to get right what the natural world gave her.  Her great book Photographs of British Algae (1843) appeared just 4 years after the invention of the word 'photography'.

Rossiter, Ansco Cyko, expired Dec 1 1917, processed 2007

     

Anna Atkins, Halidrys siligrosa beta minor, 1843

A deep connection to materials at ICP

Breuer, Untitled (C-1189), 2012

(The following is a guest post by Eva Nikolova)

Currently on view at the International Center of Photography under the title "What is a Photograph?", a selection of the work of 21 contemporary artists purports to challenge our very notions of photography.  A provocative title, and while we may not be able to put the answer into words given the range of photographic experimentation from the last four decades that are the focus here, we still assume: we’ll know it when we see it.  But an ostensive definition can no longer encompass the works of those artists who are engaged in stripping bare the very basis of that recognition.  So what must be still present for a work to constitute a photograph?  Clearly not the camera: fully a third of the artists in “What is a Photograph?” have abandoned the iconic device, and some have gone much further, casting aside almost everything assumed indispensably photographic.

                                                                                                                                  

Breuer, Study for (Metal/Day), 2000

Dispensing even with the action of light or chemistry, here are some of the highly tactile, deliberately modest-in-size works of Marco Breuer.  Dazzling in the inexhaustible inventiveness of his methods, Breuer scrapes, scratches, sands, folds, burns, drills, and otherwise mutilates his photo paper creating unsettling tension between image and surface violation.  “Deliberate misuse” is his own phrase for the way he treats his materials, but plain "abuse" seems more apt: how else to describe scorching the paper with red hot coals, dynamite or a frying pan, or shooting - with a gun not a camera - a box of photo paper?  In fact, shooting with a camera is what Breuer has done the least of, even when starting out – his introduction to photography was through photograms.

Rossiter, Defender Velour Black, expired Jan 1946, processed 2011 (C), 2011

 

Rossiter, Fuji Gaslight, expired date unknown, ca. 1920s, processed 2009 (D), 2009

And then, there are the works of Alison Rossiter, which she describes as “found-photograms”. Rossiter seeks out gelatin silver papers that have expired many decades ago, and as if out of veneration for these relics of the photographic past, keeps her interventions minimal: she simply develops the entire sheet of paper, or else applies a little developer to a part of it.  For all the evocative shapes, planes and shadows that materialize onto the papers as a result, the subtly colored monochrome abstractions represent nothing external, just their own particular histories – ghostly traces of time made visible through darkroom chemistry.  In a one piece on view, the photographer withdraws almost completely: she presents to us a small rectangle of Eastman Kodak Solio, presumed to have expired around 1910, that she has left unprocessed.  Perhaps she felt the one hundred-year-old paper had endured enough - its incredibly rich, copper-like surface certainly suggests as much.  Like commemorative markers, Rossiter’s works simply bear the names of the paper, the year of expiration and that of processing.  If this elegy for darkroom photography seems merely nostalgic instead of poignant, and the concerns hermetic instead of urgent, it may be that to fully take in the impact of the work, you’d have to feel a deep connection to such materials and a personal stake in the continued existence of analog photography.  But even if you are not similarly moved, the works’ sheer visual presence - at once sumptuous and spare, sensuous and severe – may feel like a revelation.

Although working at seemingly different ends of a spectrum, Rossiter’s principled withdrawal and Breuer’s intensely physical engagements both share in the creation of objects that operate at the very edge of our assumptions of what a photograph is.  And where exactly is that elusive edge?  Perhaps it has become so razor-thin, so exquisitely whetted by the attempts to penetrate the obdurate essence of the medium in the last forty years, that it’s invisible until touched by the right hands, and then, suddenly, we see the mystery and beauty embedded in the materials we have taken for granted, laid bare before us.

Eva Nikolova

www.evanikolova.com

Chemigram shows for rest of the year, including some you'll have to travel to

Man-Kit Lam, 2005

For those with a yen for travel, we've gathered a few shows you may want to catch before the year is out.  All include chemigrams either solely or in part or, in Ms Rossiter's case, include what might be called a chemigramic inflection - and for that reason alone they're all worth seeing, besides the utter beauty and mystery of them.  If we've missed your show, please post a comment and we'll fix it.

Pierre Cordier 
Paris Photo, HackelBury Gallery, November 10-13, 2011, Grand Palais, Paris, France

Dominic Man-Kit Lam
Ink Art: a world without rules, September 2011 & February 2012, Novel Plaza, 128 West Nanjing Road, Shanghai, China

Alison Rossiter
Art Platform LA, Yossi Milo Gallery, October 1-3, 2011, LA Mart, Los Angeles, California, USA

Alison Rossiter
Paris Photo, Stephen Bulger Gallery, November 10-13, 2011, Grand Palais, Paris, France

Edward Mapplethorpe
The Variations, October 5 - November 12, 2011, Dubner Moderne, rue du Grand-Chêne 6, Lausanne, Switzerland

Norman Sarachek
Emerging Artists Annual Showcase, November 4, 2011, Allure West Studios, 15 E State St, Doylestown, Pennsylvania, USA

Matthew Higgins
Pingyao International Photography Festival, September 1 - September 30, 2011, Pingyao, Shanxi Province, China

Nolan Preece
Continuitive: Connections Between Parallel Directions, Dec 2011 - January 2012, Truckee Meadows Community College, 7000 Dandini Blvd, Reno, NV, USA

Douglas Collins
New Prints 2011 Selected by Trenton Doyle Hancock, October 3, 2011 - March 28, 2012, Pfizer Corporation, 235 E 42 St, New York, New York, USA

just closed:

Dominic Man-Kit Lam
Sino-French Exhibition of Art Exchange, September 20-22, 2011, National Library Exhibition Center, Beijing, China

Nolan Preece
Xhibit, May 13 to August 27, 2011, Preston Contemporary Art Center, 1755 Avenida del Mercado, Mesilla, New Mexico, USA

Alison Rossiter

Rossiter, Nepera Velox, expired August 1906, processed in 2010

Rossiter, Fuji, expiration date unknown ca. 1930s, processed in 2010

Rossiter, Eastman Kodak Royal Bromide, expired March 1919, processed in 2010

If you've ever had the good fortune of seeing Alison Rossiter's work in Canadian galleries like the Stephen Bulger in Toronto or Art45 in Montreal, her one-of-a-kind pictures are hard to forget. It's not that she's been known merely for cameraless work - she is an extremely pure exemplar of that word - but rather for pictures without any conscious imagery whatever: from a background in photographic conservation and an obvious love for the history of photography, she collects vintage photographic paper at auctions or rummage sales and develops it, to see what strange marks time and chance may have left. Dings, abrasions, smudges, spills rich in old chemistry - these become remarkable and somehow moving in her hands, and can be seen on her site and elsewhere.

More recently she's been invoking the spirit of these rare papers by inoculating them with a bit of developer, creating simple but haunting photograms or chemigrams. In her new show at Yossi Milo in New York City, it's shocking at first to realize that these darkly elegant shapes, created only this year, are executed on papers which may be nearly a century old. Velox, Ansco, Kodabromide, there is a roll-call here of legendary names most of us have forgotten or never known; the drama of their return to center-stage is staggering. The edges of the papers, as you dare get closer, are sometimes discolored, and why wouldn't they be. The whites display a gamut of tints, from bone white to thin yellows to faint mauves, representing, one might say, the dreams of bygone epochs in which they were conceived. And then the blacks. The regions where her hand has passed or where she slowly tilted the paper charged with developer, the blacks are pushed to maximum density, unmodulated; they possess a massive authority and seem to engage in a mute, secret dialog with the whites. In some pictures Alison gives us the added surprise of a second layer of black, this one not allowed to proceed to full development. Its dusklike tones dance at the edges of still darker areas, suggesting movement, twisting, indecision, and life.

Some have called Alison's work minimalist, and at first glance it's easy to see why. Her methods, her commitment to a process, a spare, arbitrary imagery - in conversation she said someone even compared her to Barnett Newman. But the more you stand in the presence of these works, the more you feel the operation of an intense personal engagement and emotion that rises above minimalism, and puts it far behind. You must see this show.