The Edge of Vision:
Abstraction in Contemporary Photography

Artist Statements

Carel Balth

The series Videowatercolors represents Carel Balth’s investigation of the trans­lation of images among media. BaIth begins with an archive of video clips, from which he extracts still images. These serve as the basis for “paintings,” which are translations of the images to canvas. The images have neither a strictly photographic origin nor output, but their intermediate state halts time and movement, finally rendering them into a photograph.

Ellen Carey

Practicing what she calls “photography degree zero,” Ellen Carey uses a giant Polaroid camera to create abstract images that incorporate chance and chemistry. Borrowing from the language of Minimalism and process art, the titles of her pieces-Pulls with Mixed and Off-Set Pods and Pull and Rollback, for example-reflect the physical actions taken to make the pieces. Her decision to exhibit both positive and negative elements of the film overturns the traditional valorization of the positive print as the source of photographic truth.

Michael Flomen

Using no lenses, Michael Flamen records physical phenomena as luminous photograms on large sheets of photographic paper. Exposed over a long time frame, usually at night, the paper records what the eye cannot retain: an accumulation of natural events.

Charles Lindsay

Charles Lindsay creates an emulsion of carbon and applies it to a transparent polyester support. The patterns created in the application constitute a “negative” of enormously rich texture and suggestiveness, which, when scanned at high resolution, can be printed at almost any size due to its fine grain. These negatives formed the basis of Lindsay’s three videos that played in the exhibition screening room, and Carbon, his stainless steel “book.”

Irene Mamiye

Irene Mamiye showed her video Veils. Veils is a narrative, experimental short made up of photographs, found and recorded sound, and computer-generated motion. Veils conceal, and their dropping away is a universal metaphor for enlightenment. But with the soul, veils open only to reveal others beyond them, in a never-completed process of resistance, disclosure, and integration. This video, conceived from still images and digitally animated, is a metaphoric reflection on the repressed history and unfinished identity of one such soul: an American Jewish woman with Egyptian roots, now an outsider in France. Peering through the veils toward an abiding radiance, the viewer undergoes a process similar to that by which the artist, in making the work, embraced her incomplete self.

Jack Sal

Painter, sculptor, and photographer Jack Sal explored the process of photography as it unfolded during the exhibition. Over time, the printing-out paper registered its interaction with metal and salt in four different arrangements, each one providing an image­ less record of the exhibition. The combination of elements also pointed to the different time frames in which various processes unfold-from the watching of an exhibition, to the oxidation of a metal surface, to the tracing of an image by light.

Penelope Umbrico

Penelope Umbrico uses found images, highly distanced from their sources, to point out photography’s inadvertent power in a society based on the creation of consumer need. These degraded images of television sets, taken from ads on Craigslist.org, the internet listing service, are little more than icons of desire, bearing little specific information. Yet they retain ghostly reflections of the worlds from which they come.

Silvio Wolf

For Silvio Wolf, photography’s task is to investigate the real by unveiling the poetic properties of the image. Strictly speaking, Wolf’s images are documentary, depicting objects and situations in the world, yet they are photographed in such a way as to reduce the codes of reference and open the images up to wider associations of color, form, and mood. Silvio Wolf’s video II Tesoro, made in the remarkable space of the Banca del Gottardo, in Lugano, Switzerland, was on view in the screening room.

llan Wolff

In the extended series The Four Elements, noted pinhole photographer llan Wolff subjects photographic paper to direct contact with the primordial elements: fire (heated metal), water (melting ice), earth, and air (photograms made from light passing through balloons). Like the ancient alchemists, his approach transmutes one form of energy into another: the chemical residue that forms a photographic image.

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