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Sacred Places, Sacred Spaces: The Photography of Linda Connor
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10695 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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6 / 1993 |
1,920 Words |
| Author
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Darwin Marable
Darwin Marable is a photo historian, writer, lecturer, and
independent curator based in the San Francisco Bay area. |
The exhibition Earthy Constelletion: Photographs by Linda Connor features forty black-and-white photographs dating from the late 1970s to the present. At first glance, they may seem like travel documents, of Connor's trips to Asia, South America, Europe, and the southwestern United States, but that is deceptive. A prolonged viewing, through, reveals an artist whose international journeys are a spiritual quest for universal symbols.
Born in New York City in 1944 and reared in New England, Connor studied with two of the titans of modern American photography, Harry Callahan, at the Rhode Island School of Design, and Aaron Siskind, at the Institute of Design, Illinois Institute of Technology, where she completed her M.S.degree in 1969. Since 1969, she has been an instructor at the San Francisco Art Institute.
The Bauhaus philosophy at the Institute of Design was especially critical in shaping Connor's thinking about photography as an art form, as it encouraged experimentation at a time when most photographers were committed to a simple, direct approach termed straight photography. Consequently, her early work consists of collagelike compositions, multiple imagery the integration of photography and drawing, the incorporation of found objects, recycled images, and hand-colored and manipulated prints.
After inheriting her great aunt's 8 x 10 Deardorf view camera in the late 1970s, Connor unexpectedly revered to the earlier pictorialist approach to photography. The pictorialist attempted to make photographs look artistic through a variety of techniques, including the use of soft-focus lenses. Working in the nineteenth-century tradition, Connor contact-printed her 8-bym-10-inch negatives on printing-out paper; developed them in the sunlight in her garden, and toned them with gold chloride giving them a deep, rich warm tone and archival permanence. A collection of these photographs of common objects was published in her book Solos (1979), where the subjects are recognizable but seem to come to us fro the world of dream and reverie. In one of these photographs a stack of cans formed in the shape of a pyramid has been transformed into an image that radiates both light and energy.
Regarding her use of lenses, Connor has said, "With the soft-focus lens, I could photograph that pyramid of cans, for instance, and transform in into something quite glorious. They still remain cans with a sharp lens--I did do a sharp picture; it's not bad, but it's not great. It doesn't go beyond the situation. The sharp lens, in a way, forces a more stringent
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