Jennifer Trausch has been photographing on location in the Southern United States for the past three years. Taking a “vacation” from her job managing the 20×24 Studio in New York City, Trausch explored Southern culture with a device not usually associated with intimate documentation, the 235 pound 20×24 Camera. In this article Trausch describes her aesthetic and technique of this truly unique body of work. Click here to download a pdf of the article.
Timothy Greenfield-Sanders and New Cultural Icons
In 2002 Hearst Magazine produced a special issue with Narciso Rodriguez, Chloe Sevigny, Mike and Doug Starn, Audra McDonald, A.M. Homes, Rocco DiSpirito, Karim Rashid, and Babel Gilberto. Timothy Greenfield-Sanders chose to use the Polaroid 20×24 Camera for the occassion.
Timothy Greenfield-Sanders and the 20×24 CameraSpook Magazine Features 20×24 Imagery in 2002
In 2002 the way ahead of its time on-line magazine Spook did an in depth article on the 20×24 studio. From Joyce Tenneson, Timothy Grenfield-Sanders, William Wegman to John Reuter, this image rich article provides an excellent snapshot of 20×24 photography at the beginning of the decade. Click here to download the article, written by Anthony Sapienza.Caroline Chiu: Polaroids as Chinese Ink Painting
Caroline Chiu: Polaroids as Chinese Ink Painting
An installation from A Chinese Wunderkammer
Snite Museum of Art
Milly and Fritz Kaeser Mestrovic Studio Gallery
March 14 to April 25, 2010
These photographs are taken from Hong Kong artist Caroline Chiu’s larger series entitled Dreaming: A Chinese Wunderkammer. Wunderkammer were 17th- and 18th-century European “wonder rooms” or “cabinets of curiosity”––some of the earliest known “museums”––which contained specimens reflecting the natural world, anthropology, archaeology, relics, and art. The late Qing emperor Qianlong, known for his passion for the arts, also pursued this type of collecting.
In Chiu’s case, she collects, by photography, objects representing the material culture of traditional China: bonsai, scholar’s rocks, flowers, artworks depicting the animal zodiac, and, here, goldfish. Her choice of subjects makes reference to historical Chinese culture; her graphic photographic images of goldfish suggest the brushstrokes of traditional Chinese ink painting and the sweeping abstract shapes of Chinese writing.
Because the images were taken with a rare 20 x 24 inch Polaroid camera—for which film is no longer manufactured––the exhibition is also an elegy to the era of Polaroid cameras and film. See the review in the South Bend Tribune.
Jennifer Trausch: Behind the Scenes in the South
Here are some of Jennifer Trausch’s personal recollections from her days on location in the South:
“It was the hottest day of our trip and we were quite run down having driven some three thousand miles in the last couple weeks. The night before my assistant, Kim, and I had worked at a Zydeco dance hall outside of Opelousas, Louisiana. We had shot late into the night until the dancers had worn themselves out. We were covered in bug bites from loading the equipment into the truck in the pitch black near railroad tracks we had only heard signs of. The day before the truck had broken down for the second time. It is hard enough to haul around a 235 pound camera, but having to move it in and out of a broken truck was yet another test of our determination. We had to get back to New York soon, and were driving northbound in Mississippi when we saw a handwritten sign for a fair and followed it, intrigued. The fairground was so small that you could walk through it in a couple of minutes. It was the middle of the afternoon and the air was heavy and the old rides were still. The location was perfect for our way of shooting; It was small enough that we could negotiate our way around with the camera but big enough that we would have a good selection of subjects to work with. I immediately gravitated toward the dunking booth; It was a simple box of water with a splintered board to sit on. Life preservers were hanging on a fence nearby just in case. I used my digital camera to make notes, circling the booth to find the best vantage point. One could only imagine who would be sitting up there later.
Read the whole story and view location photos by Kimberlee Venable.The Home of Large Format Instant Photography
