COPYRIGHT NOTICE Copyright © Susan Seubert (United-States), All rights reserved. This artwork can't be used without written consent from its author.  image information
 | | | Account | PREMIUM - Unlimited | | Status | Professional photographer | | Title | Dress_o_gram 9 | | Art Limited | Featured on April 5, 2011 at 03:00am by Denis Olivier | | Category | Error ? | Photography / Toned / Darkroom / Object / Clothing | | Gallery | Portfolio | | Comment | In these photogram tintypes by the 35-year-old Portlander, tiny delicate antique doll and children’s clothes flare their lacy skirts and pucker their ruffles, the gowns and slips, bonnets and gloves wafting on their wavy-emulsion surfaces. The 25 mostly 20x16-inch dark- wood-framed girlhood garments hung on Froelick’s walls like freshly washed laundry pinned on a line to dry, a gentle breeze blowing through their translucent forms.
Says Seubert in her artist’s statement, “It was like magic when the image appeared on the plate—I was amazed at the beautiful and haunting quality of the surface combined with the shadow of an empty dress . . . The dresses appear to have an astonishing amount of volume; the open backs look sensual and feminine, but simultaneously empty and void of life. The distressed and runny emulsion makes them look old and adds a painterly quality to the surface of the print.”
If you grew up in puffy-sleeved Polly Flinders dresses with Peter Pan collars or played with baby dolls, you may be immediately attracted to Seubert’s “Dress-O-Grams” (her term, coined after Man Ray’s Rayograms). Regardless, it’s the eerily ethereal that captivates in these dark, grandma’s-attic artifacts conjuring up the creepy.
It begins with the series’ title, which translates as “Remember thy mortality,” and shares its name with that of the postmortem photography popular in 19th-century America and Europe. After seeing her first, finished Dress-O-Gram, Seubert was reminded of the Victorian-era memento mori daguerreotypes (later replaced by ambrotypes, tintypes and carte-de visite), many of which were of babies and toddlers during a time of high childhood mortality. Vacant of the dolls and children that once wore them, the garments in her photogram tintypes are ghosts of their former selves, roaming a nebulous realm like displaced souls in transition to the Afterlife.
Indeed, Seubert’s spectral images exude an aura of innocence and loss, nostalgia and death, as do their 19th-century counterparts. (Hers, too, are portraits, in effect, if not still lifes.) Then, people lingered lovingly with their photos of the deceased, which served as reminders of the inevitability of death, recognition of the individual’s passing and remembrance of their life. The portraits, helping loved ones mourn, were often displayed with those of the living in family albums.
There are other ways that Seubert’s Memento Mori photogram tintypes parallel the postmortem photographs of the 19th century (not that she intended any of this, but here goes). The occupants of the antique attire she purchased on eBay are not known to her. Similarly, many newborns of the 19th century weren’t named until their survival was assumed, as was the practice during a time when children weren’t necessarily expected to live beyond a year. Those who didn’t were listed as “unnamed” or “anonymous,” often with little more than the photographs of their corpses as the remaining evidence of their lives.
In many of those postmortem photos of, particularly, children, flowers filled the frame, to such an extent that they often nearly obscured the body, while their comforting presence eased viewers’ access to it. The dresses and other apparel in Seubert’s series, themselves as beautiful as flowers with their lacy and textural intricacies enhanced by the photogram’s penchant for capturing such details, entice the viewer into the morbidity of the image—the mere skeleton of a precious life—expressed by the precision of the garments juxtaposed with the murky nature of the emulsion process.
Take it a bit further and you can’t help but see hints of sexuality in Seubert’s Memento Mori series. There they are in the unfastened state of the dresses (she removed snaps and buttons to avoid glaring black dots), and doll bra and panty set and corset. She already attributes the “sensual and feminine” to this body of work, but she hadn’t considered how the understated sexuality in her images echoes the covert expression of it in Western art of the 19th century. Then, sex was repressed in society as much as death was freely and openly discussed, and photographed.
Seubert’s photograms carry forward the tradition of the medium (made by light exposed directly onto an object placed on a light-sensitive film or other surface), from the first ones ever created, in the late 1830s by William Henry Fox Talbot (who called them photogenic drawings). Invented by Hamilton Smith in 1856, the traditional tintype, also called a ferrotype, was never made with tin, but a thin sheet of black japanned iron, “coated with asphalt, then sensitized to light with salted collodion or a gelatin emulsion of silver salts. Slightly underexposed, the image shows up after developing as a positive against its own black background,” explains photography historian and writer Lyle Rexer in his book, Photography’s Antiquarian Avant-Garde: The New Wave in Old Processes (Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 2002). Seubert’s dryplate versions, of anodized aluminum sheets coated with silver gelatin emulsion, achieve the resultant optical illusion characteristic of all tintypes, due to the metal’s dark surface. But because her images are photograms, the mostly white wardrobe looks black, like negatives.
She joins other contemporary photographers in adopting 19th- and early-20th-century processes in a “movement” that Rexer calls the “antiquarian avant-garde.” Again, he says in his book, “Although the past informs this work, it is the present that incites it,” pointing to anything from photographic processes and equipment to subject matter to rebellion against the digital. Within the last decade or so, there’s Jerry Spagnoli’s daguerreotypes (images on silver-plated copper); Stephen Berkman’s, Mark Osterman’s and Jody Ake’s ambrotypes (an underexposed collodion-on-glass image developed in iron sulfate and fixed in cyanide); Christine Schiavo’s and Deborah Luster’s tintypes; and Dan Estabrook’s emulsion-on-steel photographs—to name a mere few. When it comes to 20th-century photograms, Seubert is hardly alone, from Ray’s and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy’s, early in the last century, to recently produced works by Adam Fuss and Jayne Hinds Bidaut.
Get to Bidaut’s photogram tintypes and you see an uncanny resemblance to those by Seubert, who maintains she was unfamiliar with her work while producing Memento Mori. The theme of mortality thrives in the former’s tintypes of collected dead insects. These and Seubert’s photos present themselves the way science was visually recorded by imagists in the photography of the 19th century, “the time of inventory and catalogue, of classification and objectification,” continues Rexer. “Many of the artists using old processes today focus on such inventories as emblems of modern scientific consciousness.” That said, Seubert’s Dress-O-Grams begin to look more and more like medical X-rays or laboratory specimens.
Again, Rexer: “Perhaps the most pervasive legacy of nineteenth-century imagery is anatomical. Body parts, fragments, and skeletons show up in the developing trays of contemporary artists with alarming frequency . . .” It’s Bidaut’s “Human Skeleton” (1999), a dryplate photogram tintype made with 12 plates, and especially her four-photogram tintype, “Chrysemys Scripta Elegans (Turtle Skeleton)” (1999), that cinch the similarity between the two artists. The reptile’s bony form mimics Seubert’s “Christening Dress” (2005), both images with their arms stretched out, centered on a four-square field of drippy, unevenly applied emulsion.
Two of Seubert’s Memento Mori dresses make their debut in her 2003-2004 series, Pretty Things. Also tintypes, they previsualize the succeeding series, with the apparel’s centered placement on the irregularly coated surfaces of their anodized aluminum. The small tintypes of Masao Yamamoto inspired Seubert to create her intimate 2x2-inch photographs of these garments, fruits, flowers and snow scenes.
The loveliness of these objects, however, stands out as an aberration in her oeuvre, preoccupied as it is with subject matters related the darkest corners of human nature—from domestic violence and dump sites of murder victims to madness and remembrance of the dead. Seubert’s very first four series—beginning with her first solo exhibition in 1992 (at the city’s now-defunct Jamison Thomas Gallery), upon graduation with a BFA in photography from Portland’s Pacific Northwest College of Art—present abstract, social-documentary-infused images that toy with the ironic and include text.
She jumps right in with rape, in Every Three Seconds (1992), named for how often a woman is raped in the United States. In one of the 40x60- and 70x90-inch gelatin silver and color photomurals, titled “It Ain’t Natural,” a man’s hand clutches his own crotch, with the words, “It ain’t natural for a man to go without.” This series segues into Violence Objects (1994), where Seubert introduces us to her tendency to catalogue. In her 4x5-inch platinum prints, 30 household objects (individually poised against black cloth backgrounds) stand in for weapons used against women. The photographs are accompanied by text taken straight from public-domain domestic violence reports.
Panphobia (1995) comes next, in response to Seubert’s self-inquiry regarding her interest in others’ savagery. Continuing the format from her previous series, again she studio-shot 30 isolated objects, each one representing things feared, such as a knife (aichmophobia, fear of sharp objects) and a seascape (thalassophobia, fear of waves). She photographed the phobias’ technical names (in the script of antique maps) as negatives, and printed them below their corresponding image in these contact-printed platinum prints.
As portraits, still lifes and catalogued items, the photographs in these last two series foreshadow Seubert’s moody treatment of her antique garments to come, taking the gloomy route that nearly all of her works traverse. But nothing gets more macabre than The Ten Most Popular Places to Dump a Body in the Columbia River Gorge (1998). Like the perfect con artist reveling in his ruse, the 16x20-inch selenium-toned, gelatin silver prints pose as pretty landscape photos—until you get to the fine print, excerpts from sheriff-department investigative reports. (Seubert shot these banal body-dump sites in the spirit of turn-of-the-last-century landscape photography, with an 8x10 view camera and Ansel Adams’ Zone System.)
In Chimeras (2000), these first tintypes of hers explore illusions and fabrications of the mind. Here, film noire-like narratives summon a sense of danger—or at least of dreams, where many of the series’ scenes originated for Seubert. After her Sextablos series (2001)—a tintype inventory of sex toys she found disturbing (part of a group show entitled, “Sextablos: Works on Metal,” organized by Chicago-based artist, Michael Hernandez De Luna)—Seubert continues with additional nods to the 19th century. Neurasthenia (2003) seizes the absurdities of insanity with an allusion to the Victorian-era nervous disorder brought on by stresses accompanying the rise of modern industrial society. Named after this psychopathological condition, Seubert’s series was inspired by her emotional response to the tragic events of September 11th. Some of the images in these abstract figurative tintypes—a tensely furrowed brow, a man’s head in midshake—call up the ambrotypes of Stephen Berkman’s “Untitled” (2000) and Ake’s “Self-portrait in Four” (1998).
Seubert’s fascination with the doomed and the dismal finds its roots in her six months at Magnum (the year she graduated) where she assisted Susan Meisalas and met other Magnum greats, her long-time interest in photojournalism (with only a fleeting desire to pursue it as a profession), the edgy art she experienced there in New York and, of course, her childhood. Domestic disputes, child abuse, theft and racial tension were common in the central-Indianapolis neighborhood where Seubert was raised, by loving parents. Maybe it’s this contrast that would later shape her work, epitomized by the tension of opposing elements, visually and conceptually.
In Memento Mori, the dichotomy hinges itself on melancholy and enchantment, lending a quality that is as undeniably romantic as the 19th-century memento mori photographs were sentimental. Seubert’s thoughtful and skillful approach towards photographic processes of previous centuries coupled with the brooding nostalgia of her subject matter—inviting our own myths and memories, recollections and reveries—transports the past into the present, and transforms them into an era of her own.
By Claire Sykes | | Public projects | 1 [ List? ] | | Equipment | Tintype, enlarger, darkroom | | Technical | Dry plate tintype | | Created | March 3, 2005 at 12:00am | | Published | August 17, 2007 at 07:00am | | Art Limited seen | Yes | | Seen by members | 456 times | | Seen by visitors | 6895 times | | Favourite | 16 times [ Who? ] |
| | more info |
Ghost Limited The outer form of memory, the remains of passion.Aug 17, 2007 at 09:27am Malin Viktoria This is an amazing piece of work! :-)Sep 3, 2007 at 02:01pm Mark Hamilton Your work leaves me speechlessMay 19, 2009 at 06:36am Follow the discussion |  |
|
Global image feed (SD)