DIGITAL TRANSITIONS:
Selections from the Light Work Collection

Contemporary Imaging:
Artists at Light Work/Community Darkrooms

Light Work/Community Darkrooms has supported artists with the production of their work for over thirty years. The list of artists who have worked at Light Work is impressive, but even more significant is how Light Work has shifted to meet the changing needs of artists. To maintain a state-of-the-art facility, it has been necessary to add digital facilities with scanners and printers to the traditional black-and-white and color darkrooms. Digital printing at Light Work has intentionally evolved through the desire to support artists in making quality images. Early digital artists could only choose between non-archival desktop printers and commercial options, such as Iris printers, while today’s artists have access to archival inkjet processes through home and professional printers. These changes have affected the scale, process, and content of the work that can be made. The work in this exhibition makes clear use of digital technology as a means of better articulating each artist’s vision.

Light Work’s participation in the making and exhibition of new artwork has kept the organization, staff, members, and artists that it works with in tune with new methods of digitally producing work. The technical possibilities that Light Work provides change with the artists’ needs. What was once a less reciprocal relationship has become a collaborative effort in many ways. Light Work is more involved in artistic decision making, which includes choices in materials and technology that are as new to the artists as they are to the medium of photography itself. Light Work has had the pleasure of working with many of the artists in this exhibition to see how digital processes can strengthen the concept behind an artist’s creative vision. Color digital processes provide many advantages over traditional color printing through more control and software options.

Ben Gest is an artist who works exclusively with digital processes and takes full advantage of what the technology allows. He merges multiple photographs to recompose one seamless image. In Jessica and her Jewelry, some areas are in sharp focus, such as Jessica, her bed, and her jewelry, while less important areas are blurred. These subtle shifts in the way the image is created produce a more visually dynamic image. Jessica falls forward from the bed but at the same time is sitting firmly upon it. The finished works become hyper-real photographs.

Artists like Kanako Sasaki and Alessandra Sanguinetti use the digital process to accurately track and control color. Sasaki, like so many recent Artists-in-Residence, came to Light Work planning to make traditional color photographs. Upon seeing the possibilities of Light Work’s facilities, she decided to scan her negatives and print archival inkjet prints. Working closely with the artist, we were able to track the colors in the photographs to reflect the sense of imagination that is so very important to the work—the greens of grasses match more perfectly and saturations of color are equivalent from one print to the next. Alessandra Sanguinetti’s project utilizes the qualities of watercolor paper to communicate a rich, playful, and evocative color palette. The photographs communicate the sense of play and the dreams that her subjects, Guille and Belinda, act out. The quality of ink on paper reflects upon the idea of illustration, like that in a children’s picture book.

Grayscale prints have been one of the largest challenges in digital printing. This is in part because inkjet printers use colored pigments, which can create shifts in tonality when making black-and-white prints. The newest versions of pigments have added gray inks to make prints appear more continuously neutral. Neal Rantoul, who participated in the Artist-in-Residence program in 2001, challenged Light Work by making large scale black-and-white prints that began to rival silver gelatin fiber prints in quality. His process involved scanning 8x10" negatives and meticulously cleaning the digital file at the pixel level to make very large prints of expansive landscapes. His work was some of the first neutral grayscale work that Light Work was able to produce.

Matt Black, Pulitzer Prize runner-up in 2002, completed his residency at Light Work much later than Rantoul. His work benefited from a newer generation of printers and an increased level of experience printing black-and-white images digitally. Because of this, Black’s images appear more continuously neutral than Rantoul’s. The project he focused on during his residency documents the last remaining black Okies, who were forced to migrate to California in the 1930s. His use of digital technology stemmed out of need—when working in the San Joaquin Valley in California he did not have access to any wet processes, so he decided to print digitally.

Works that really challenge our understanding of the photograph, like Zoë Sheehan Saldaña and Matthew Swarts, push the ways people think of the image. Sheehan Saldaña works with appropriated digital images and produces them with a digital sewing machine. A cross-stitched image of a missing child seems to be sewn by hand, but it was actually produced by feeding the image file through a digital sewing machine. Her work questions the relationship between handmade objects and mass-produced consumer goods. Like Sheehan Saldaña, Matthew Swarts’ also turns to the internet to appropriate images. Simple internet searches for keywords such as “sex,” “love,” and “death” bring forth a visual language that Swarts reconstitutes into his work. In the process, he manipulates and prints his images onto media ranging from towels to paper bags using cheap desktop printers. High quality scans are made of the finished low-tech inkjet printouts, and then printed with the best printer and paper possible. This work questions ownership of the images and focuses on the process of printing digitally, embracing the imperfections in the low-tech prints by painstakingly reproducing them in the large exhibition prints.

Martina Lopez, View of the Heart 1, 1995

Much of the early work in this exhibition is fragile in terms of the media and printers that produced it. Terry Gips’ work, produced on an Amiga computer in 1992, is made of many prints that were pasted together. Gips’ images represent artists’ early experiences with producing digital work. The obvious pixilation in the image communicates that it is an early digital file. Today an equivalent image quality could be produced from a cell phone or similar low quality camera.

Keith Piper creates work based on his ethnic identity through the layering and merging of effects to digitally collage multiple images together. Martina Lopez uses similar methods to place vintage black-and-white family photographs into colorful landscapes. Osamu James Nakagawa similarly works with family images, which he layers with filmstrips that read as a rain or confetti, to mediate the memory of his family and culture. These pieces all use digital montage and collage techniques to re-contextualize memory, family, history, and personal identity. What was once the purvey of Jerry Uelsmann, a master of traditional enlarger-based merging of images, has become a common language through digital photography.

Sunil Gupta’s work uses digital processes to combine two images on one page. This seems a simple step, but for Gupta it gives the diptych a literal and metaphorical connection. The two images become one seamless image rather than two photographs butted against one another. This uncomplicated act is certainly one that digitalization makes easier. And, in making the comparisons between two homes, the image becomes more connected both metaphorically and physically.

The photographs in this exhibition are examples of the ways the digital image has changed photographic production and visual language. As Light Work/Community Darkrooms continues to support new types of image production, it is the organization’s challenge to adapt in ways that will best serve the artists and continue to be a state-of-the-art facility.

John Mannion
Digital Lab Manager
Light Work/Community Darkrooms
©2006

Artists in this exhibition include Anthony Aziz & Sammy Cucher, Lois Barden & Harry Littell, Matt Black, Ben Gest, Terry Gips, Myra Greene, Sunil Gupta, Deborah Jack, Mona Jimenez, Keith Johnson, Martina Lopez, James Nakagawa, Barry Perlus, John Pfahl, Keith Piper, Neal Rantoul, Zoë Sheehan Saldaña, Alessandra Sanguinetti, Kanako Sasaki, Matthew Swarts, Scott Townsend, Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie, and Kim Waale.

This exhibition was supported in part by a grant from the Syracuse University Division of Student Affairs U Encounter program. It was also supported by PULSE. Light Work is a member of CMAC, the Coalition of Museum and Art Centers at Syracuse University.

The Robert B. Menschel Photography Gallery is located in the Schine Student Center on the Syracuse University campus at 303 University Avenue, Syracuse, NY 13244. For information, please contact Light Work at 315.443.1300.

The Louise and Bernard Palitz Gallery is located in the Joseph I. Lubin House at 11 E. 61st Street, New York, NY 10021. For information, please contact the Lubin House 212.442.2230.

Digital Transitions Links:

Photography in Transition
essay by Christopher Secor

Contemporary Imaging:
Artists at Light Work/Community Darkrooms
essay by John Mannion

Exhibition Checklist

Exhibition images in Light Work Collection
(includes slide show option)

Pipo Nguyen-duy
EAST OF EDEN

January 17–March 9, 2006

Main Gallery
Robert B. Menschel Media Center

Transmedia Photography Annual
featuring work by Transmedia students at Syracuse University

January 17–March 9, 2006

Hallway Gallery
Robert B. Menschel Media Center