Visitors to Light Work’s website are invited to explore thousands of photographic works and objects from the Light Work Collection in our online database that expands access of work by former Light Work artists to students, researchers, and online visitors. Our Re:Collection blog series invites artists and respected thinkers in the field to select a single image or object from the archive and offer a reflection as to its historical, technical, or personal significance.

Today we’re sharing a reflection on John Banasiak’s image of Light Work co-founder Phil Block. In unique Re:Collection twist, Banasiak, the portrait image-maker, is also the author, offering contemplative insights on this early organization champion and the impact of artist residency on his photography practice.

In 1977, I had the good fortune of being one of Light Work’s first artists-in-residence. Invited by Phil Block and Tom Bryan, I spent the month of October printing some of the negatives from my ongoing series of nightwork and interacting with a community of people who appreciated the beauty and poetic language of photography. I also had the honor of having my work appear in the first issue of Contact Sheet. 

I came from Chicago in an Oldsmobile Delta ‘88, a “Drive Away Car” I was hired to drive and drop off at a car dealership somewhere in Syracuse. I parked in front of Light Work on Waverly, put out my cigar, walked up the front steps, and into Phil Block’s office. It was like I was reuniting with a brother or cousin I hadn’t seen in a long while. His friendly, laid-back, good-humored nature made me feel as if I had known him all my life. He happened to know the car dealership that I needed to get to, so we drove out and back and had some great talks and told each other a bunch of good stories. Soon they showed me around the facility and introduced me to a few of the people who were there—Karl Baden, Dave Broda, Marion Faller, Bill Gandino, Peter Glendinning, Judith Ivry, and others. Tom Bryant would show up occasionally and drive me around to some of the interesting sites of the surrounding countryside. 

Within a day or two, I was mixing up some Selectol in the back darkroom and printing from my stack of 4×5 negatives, occasionally stepping out in the hall to dry my test strips, sipping Pelican Punch tea from the food co-op just down the hall from the darkroom, and talking with some of the students and photo addicts who hung out in the studio.   

Along with having the opportunity to print, I also explored the area and gathered some new work as I wandered through the neighborhoods, strolled the boulevards (Genesee), and parks (Thornden) of the area. I had falafels at King David’s, cheesecake from the Snow Flake Bakery, shots and beer with the locals at the Orange. I danced to the tropical country music of Dan Hicks and his Hot Licks at the Jabberwocky across the street from Light Work. I ate dinners of crustless quiche with Susan Narucki, a beautiful woman with a beautiful voice who, as a work/study, took care of the Light Work darkroom and went on to international acclaim as a Grammy-winning soprano for her recording of George Crumb’s “Star Child” in 2000. I took evening swims in the University pool. Phil and I occasionally went out at night and listened to the local music. There was a great diversity in music available on campus, but Phil and I both liked jazz and blues so we hit some of those places. Phil had a stand-up bass that he sometimes played at home while listening to Thelonious Monk, or Coltrane, and I thought he was pretty good.

The mix and steady flow of photographers and visiting artists though those days at Light Work always provided an infusion of good creative thought and energy. Light Work was very connected with what was going on at the Everson Museum, as well as what was happening at Syracuse University’s art school and galleries. Clement Greenberg lectured one evening, Bill Owens talked about his book Suburbia, Marion Post Wolcott reflected on her time with the WPA, and one afternoon Michael Jennings read some of his poetry at the Dorothea Lange exhibition at the Everson. It was a stimulating time and I knew I would have a difficult time leaving. Former teachers of mine, Charles Harbutt and Joe Jachna, were there a few months before me. Cal Kowal was coming as an artist-in-residence just after me—I had worked with him at Ox-Bow Summer School of Art the year before and was going to miss him by just a couple of months.  

My time at Light Work solidified my enjoyment and affection for the college environment and the creative energy that can emerge and grow there. After I left at the beginning of November, I decided to think more about teaching and being a part of a creative community in a college environment. Soon after leaving Syracuse and Light Work, Phil called me and asked me if I might be able to get away from Chicago to take over a one-year position teaching photography up at SUNY Oswego. Returning to upstate New York sounded great. I called Tom Eckersley, the chair in Oswego’s College of Art, and the next thing I knew, I was loading up a U-Haul and heading to Oswego.

My year in Oswego was inspirational. Occasionally it included trips down to Syracuse (via Heid’s hot dog stand in Liverpool) to visit Phil and Light Work. It also began a chain of events that led to alternative process workshops at Auckland University and Christchurch University in New Zealand and eventually to a position in the College of Fine Art at the University of South Dakota in Vermillion where, this August, I am heading into my 42nd year of teaching an ever-changing mix of the old and new processes and visual dialects of photography.   

Phil Block and Light Work have played a significant part in my growth and development as an artist and as an educator, and I will always feel affection and gratitude for all that they have generously given me. One final thing that I’d like to mention. When I did drive out to Oswego to teach for that year back in 1978, one of the first photography students I met when I was putting together my classes was a talented young artist by the name of Paul Pearce. I see now that he will be a Light Work Grants recipient for this coming year. His work continues to be personal, revealing, and meaningful. I look forward to seeing some of his new work, and I wish him the best, and I hope that he has a creative, productive, and inspirational time at Light Work.   

Find more of John Banasiak’s work online here.

Explore the Light Work Collection online at http://collection.lightwork.org

The Darryl Chappell Foundation has honored Light Work with a $10,000 grant. The award will support the residency of two lens-based artists from the African Diaspora. Artists-in-residence is selected through Light Work’s annual residency juror review process, with an anticipated announcement of all residents, including Darryl Chappell Foundation recipients, in late summer 2021.

The Darryl Chappell Foundation seeks to enable emerging and established artists to achieve their highest potential,” said Foundation Chair and CEO Darryl Chappell. “We accomplish this by providing grants as well as by sponsoring artist-in-residence programs designed with the needs of artists, art patrons, mentors, and key partners in mind. Through this work, we believe a more authentic artist voice can be made visible, and heard, on a global scale.

Every year Light Work invites between 12 and 15 artists to come to Syracuse to devote one month to creative projects. More than 400 artists have participated in Light Work’s Artist-in-Residence (AIR) Program, and many of them have gone on to achieve international acclaim. The residency includes a $5,000 stipend, a furnished artist apartment, 24-hour access to our state-of-the-art facilities, and generous staff support. Work by each Light Work AIR appears in a special edition of Contact Sheet: The Light Work Annual along with a commissioned essay.

About Darryl Chappell Foundation 

The mission and purpose of the Darryl Chappell Foundation is to foster an appreciation of the fine arts (for example, painting, drawing, sketching, sculpture, ceramics, photography, and metallurgy) among members of the African Diaspora (descendants of Sub-Saharan Africa) through grants, as well as to help foster an appreciation of the fine arts within the community. 

Jan McCullough is the recipient of the Irish Museum of Modern Art’s( IMMA) Photography Residency Award which commenced January 2020, offering an opportunity to undertake two formal residencies: one at IMMA and the other in partnership with the internationally renowned Light Work in Syracuse, New York. The award included a third peripatetic residency supporting self-initiated international research journeys as proposed by the artist. In early 2020 McCullough went to the USA to take a deeper dive in to the rituals and rhythms of the DIY processes we use to construct and imagine ourselves. Visiting workshops, businesses and meeting with self-improvement initiatives McCullough connected with sub-cultures of collective and creative thinking.

McCullough returned to IMMA’s Residency where these accumulative experiences shifted her work significantly. In her IMMA studio McCullough pushed her photography and research further in to 3D form. As the world came to a standstill in March 2020 a second journey to the USA was put on hold, along with a residency with Light Work scheduled for May 2020. Since then Light Work successfully re-instated international online residencies, with McCullough completing a remote one-month residency in February 2021. Jan McCullough will return to IMMA later this year to resume the final stage of this expanded residency award.

Below Sarah Allen interviews Jan McCullough about the role of photography in her work, what informs her methodology with the artform, how her practice has evolved with recent opportunities and events, and what’s next.

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Photography is often a starting point in your work, and I know the camera’s capacity as a research tool is central. Could you speak about how the role of photography has evolved in your practice?

Photography is the backbone of my work, though it’s not always the end point in my process. Recently it has played a more fluid role – as source material, becoming reconfigured into more sculptural and three-dimensional forms. I’m interested in the instructional quality of photography–it can represent how an object or space should ‘ideally’ look (e.g. in instruction manuals) or how it can prescribe a certain way of viewing, through chosen framing. I think there’s a really fascinating relationship between photography and sculpture… the physicality of it – the camera can visually dissect a space, reconfiguring forms within it. I often do this physically too, through photographic collage – in preparation for building into 3D forms.

I’ve always used my own photographs in scrapbooks and sketchbooks in a tactile way as part of my process …photocopying, cutting up, gluing together or painting over – making new configurations within the images. Recently I realised I had built up an evolving archive of images from spaces of ‘construction’ that I kept returning to photograph, such as hardware shops, garages, sheds and factory floors. During lockdown I took the scrapbooks with these ‘reconfigured’ photographs and started to physically construct the flat images inside them for the first time.

What is it that interests you about these ‘spaces of construction’? 

The role of photography within the DIY / self-improvement culture fascinates me – how we use it to construct and imagine ourselves. I have previously documented ‘spaces’ generated by DIY activities, where the photographic image acts as an interface between the private and public performances of desire, such as in Home Instruction Manual (2014-2016), where I made and documented a home ‘from scratch’, using advice from strangers on the internet. Photography encircles and shapes us whether we like it or not, through advertising, television, online…a better life has been commodified to be bought and built. But what does it look like to ‘build’ a life when desires are shaped by advertising and the photographic image?  And what do the spaces [in which these processes become physical] look like?

I also love how you have previously described the ‘rituals and rhythms’ that take place in these spaces and I’m interested in that sense of play that comes across in your installations. For example, Tricks of the Trade (2020) sees the functional object – a worktable or scaffolding – losing its function – becoming an absurd object and the installation on a whole wonderfully evokes a playground.

There is a childlike curiosity in entering into a space of construction which is not your own – like stepping into a temporary world or someone else’s den. When making Tricks of the Trade, (an installation of structures, sculptures and photographs exploring spaces of construction opened in November 2020 and runs until 1 May 2021 at The Centre for Contemporary Art CCA in Derry/Londonderry), I was thinking about the sensation in these spaces and how the materials and assemblages often seem to develop a language or life of their own. While I had brought materials to use and photographs as ‘notes’, the building of the structures themselves took part solely in the gallery in an ‘ad hoc’ way which responded to the space, like how the photographs were collaged and reconfigured in the scrapbooks at the start of my process. The structures in the gallery are three-dimensional translations of (sections of) my photographs… transformed / physically constructed into the space. There was a playfulness to the materials themselves that I wanted to let evolve during the installation in CCA.

And that sense of play is also activated by how the viewer interacts with the installation, correct? 

Yes – for me the installation is only half visual, it’s also the smell and experience of the materials themselves – the wood, metal, paint and oil. I’m fascinated with how photography can encounter and transform built space. I wanted to build sections of the installation to guide the viewer to different planes of view and ways of navigating it – like when I’m using a camera; where I position my body translates directly to the image frame. They might have duck under or climb through parts of the structures. To interact with materials in this way is quite childlike.

In the past you have mentioned your interest in the camera’s capacity to ‘make strange’ –a concept that has such a rich history within avant-garde photography. I also find it interesting that you have spoken in the past of how the camera’s mechanical function is the very means through which it ‘makes strange’ through flash, zoom, framing and different angles – again something pioneered by avant-gardes like Moholy-Nagy who embraced the camera’s mechanical eye to see the world anew. It’s interesting to consider within the context of your work in which you create 3D sculpture inspired by the language of photographic process such as flash etc….

Definitely – the camera by its very nature makes our world strange. The photograph is always a slice of a larger picture, a subjective abstraction of reality. When photographing I often work with a powerful flash, which singles out details from the surrounding environment – dissecting and sometimes reducing individual features to outlines. I like using the photograph as a tool not simply for representing objects and spaces, but for reconfiguring their form and function as well – as a source of shapes and forms to be further transformed in later stages of work.

I love the research images of materials (and their transformation later as paintings) in Paul Nash’s work (eg. Still Life on Car Roof (1934) and Maurice Broomfield’s photographs of factory workers from the 50’s and 60’s. Also, the more functional/utilitarian use of photography (as you say, embracing the camera’s mechanical eye) – like in Bernd and Hilla Becher’s ‘Pennsylvania Coal Mine Tipples’ (1974 – 1978) and the manual ‘Instant Furniture’ (Peter S Stamberg / The Globus Brothers, 1976).

I love the reference to Broomfield as well as Nash. There was an excellent exhibition of Broomfield’s work I saw not so long ago in Derby – the factory floor, but not as we know it! The works is so theatrical and glamorous. What is it in particular that interests you about these images? 

Broomfield’s images are highly staged and lit, and the working environments within them look lush and shiny; completely the opposite of how I would have imagined them. But of course, his photographs weren’t ‘documentary’, instead commissioned by industrial corporations for promotional use… hence the machinery and workers poised picture-perfect and polished for his camera. I read that he once repainted a whole section of a factory in preparation for an image! The photographic staging looks so surreal within those environments…

I love the idea of repainting a section of the factory to prep for a shoot – a time before photoshop! I’m also interested in the role text plays in your work, it featured in one of your first bodies of work Home Instruction Manual (2014-2016) and more recently you have commissioned the author Wendy Erskine to write about your work…

I often work with DIY manuals and procedures for organising as part of my process – where images are printed alongside written commands. When making Tricks of the Trade, I knew I would have to provide a brief text for the viewer but didn’t want to prescribe an experience of the work– I wanted the text to have a life of its own, like the materials themselves. For Wendy’s text which is titled ‘Instructions for the Assembly of Workspace’ I posted her a small package of materials from my studio such as photographs of ladders, worktables, collages and a list of things I had in the studio. It formed a strange kind of menu and Wendy then wrote the text using that ‘menu’ as a point of departure. Wendy drops the reader right into their own imagined space of construction– requiring them to utilise their own tactile memory and smell.

It’s a fantastic text, recently I find myself most drawn to photobook text commissions that are creatively independent like Wendy’s, a refreshing change from deadening the work through over-interpretation. Finally, can you tell me a little more about your current work with The Light Work Residency and your future engagements with IMMA?

The Light Work Residency (in partnership with IMMA) was originally meant to be a production residency in New York, it recently took place under lockdown conditions from home. I used the time to fully immerse myself in the tactile processes that are central to my practice as part of the experimentation process for new work involving photographic and sculptural processes. It’s been great to have remote studio visits and conversations about the evolving work with the Light Work community. I’m interested to see how this period alters my processes going forward, and after working scaled-down at home, I’m excited to see how the work evolves and physically expands when I return to the studio space at IMMA later this year, in 2021.