Re:Collection / Memoriam: Cjala Surratt on John Pfahl

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“Strangers with puzzled looks were amazingly cooperative in letting me into their rooms with my photographic gear. They let me take down the curtains, wash the windows, and rearrange the furniture. Often, too, they expressed their desire to share their view with others, as if it were a nondepletable treasure. I liked the idea that my photographic vantage points were not solely determined by myself. They were predetermined by others, sometimes years earlier, and patiently waited for me to discover them.” — John Pfahl on his series, Picture Windows 

With great sadness, we share news of photographer John Pfahl’s recent passing, due to pre-existing medical conditions complicated by COVID-19. Pfahl was an alum of Fine Arts (’64) and  S.I. Newhouse School of Communications (’68) at Syracuse University. A supporter of Light Work, Pfahl was a beloved University of Buffalo professor and earlier taught at the Rochester Institute of Technology. A wonderfully inventive artist, he pioneered new digital photographic procedures in both printing and digitizing negatives in an image-making career that spanned more than thirty years. Pfhal practiced a photographic sleight-of-hand that skewed the landscape by manipulating the optics of the camera with objects or digitized interruptions. Light Work’s permanent Collection holds a number of images from Pfahl’s seminal portfolio, Permutations on the Picturesque, that particularly exemplify his unique approach. 

Pfahl’s Horse at Rydal Water, Lake District, England (1995/1997) presents an idyllic meadow containing the pastoralist’s usual muses—horse, pasture, watering hole, lush green foliage—a site of nature in respite, save an interruption by the artist’s hand. Two pixelated bars on the left side of the image create a stammer in the viewers’ gaze. Here, Pfahl extends the opportunity to stop and consider the interjection, its purpose, and his own intent as the image-maker. 

Many prominent collections hold his work, including Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Center for Creative Photography, George Eastman House, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, The Museum of Modern Art, Princeton University Art Museum, and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Pfahls’s photobooks include Altered Landscapes: The Photographs of John Pfahl (Friends of Photography, 1982), Picture Windows (New York Graphic Society, 1987), A Distanced Land (with Estelle Jussim, UNM/Albright-Knox Gallery, 1990), Permutations on the Picturesque (Light Work, 1997), Waterfall (with Deborah Tall, Nazraeli Press, 2000), and Extreme Horticulture (with Rebecca Solnit, Verlag, 2003).

John’s works and tireless contributions as an educator, innovator, photographer, and author are witnesses to his passions as an artist. Light Work considers it an honor that our permanent Collection holds fifteen pieces of John Pfahl’s photographic legacy for posterity. John’s wife, Bonnie Gordon, and his brother, Walter Pfahl, survive him. We are among the many who keenly miss him. 
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View John Pfhal’s images in Light Work’s Collection here.

Browse John Pfhal’s recent work on his website.

John Pfahl (1939-2020)

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Stuart Rome, a Light Work artist-in-residence in 1978 shares memoriam tribute to his dear friend John Pfhal. Pfahl passed on Wednesday, April 15, 2020, due to pre-existing medical conditions complicated by COVID-19. He was 81.
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One of the saddest and most difficult jobs has got to be writing an obituary for a dear friend — and John Pfahl was that and more.

I attended R.I.T. starting in 1971 amongst an incredible freshman class and teachers to match, but the one who stood out was John Pfahl, who at the time was making photo installation sculpture. I had never seen anything like that and when I returned for my second year, it was with the goal of studying with John.

I, like many, have had my share of good and bad luck and one of the luckiest moments was connecting with John in his introduction to color class. John encouraged me as any good teacher would, but he also took an interest in my welfare. At the time, I was working as a janitor at the school to pay my way and in the summer cleaning students dorm rooms was especially depressing. I remember John phoning to offer the opportunity to work with him on what would become his breakthrough series, Altered Landscapes. I was so depressed that I initially passed up the opportunity, thinking that my mood would negatively affect his work, but he wouldn’t take no for an answer.  John drove from his home in Buffalo to where I was living on the outskirts of Rochester, made me pack a bag and he drove me to his home, where I spent the better part of that summer working as his assistant. That year, I became like family to both John and his wife, Bonnie Gordon, and from then on they treated me like one of their household. That summer, working daily with John at Art Park in Lewiston, NY, showed me what life as an artist looked like and I was hooked.

After I left Rochester, we kept in touch weekly and if I didn’t call, John would call me to make sure everything was OK. A few years later, when my graduate thesis show opened in Tempe, Arizona, much to my surprise, the first person that walked through the door was John Pfahl. John visited me many times in the many places I lived through the years and when he first got sick with cancer in the ’80s, I started visiting him more often in Buffalo.

John beat the cancer the first time, but it resurfaced a few years later and he beat it once again. The third time the cancer returned was just weeks before I was to leave for a year to work on a photo project in Indonesia and I drove up to Buffalo to see him in hospital to say good-bye, hoping that it would not be the final visit, and he asked me a favor. If he survived, could he come visit with me. When he was a boy, he saw a National Geographic article about central Sulawesi and always wanted to go there and, of course, I agreed. He survived and came to visit and our trip together, photographing side by side is one my happiest memories.

There are so many stories I could tell that would illustrate John’s playful sense of humor, his abiding intellect and his remarkable generosity, but that will keep for now. I still remember a sweltering Philadelphia swamp of a June day a quarter of a century ago when John walked into what would become Isaiah Zagar’s Magic Garden decked out in a sarong to be best man at my wedding. It feels eternally like yesterday.

Truly, the best possible luck was having John enter my life when he did and remain a close friend, critic, and confidante. The worst was losing him last week. Some memories have a life all their own.

View John Pfhal’s images in Light Work’s Collection here.

Browse John Pfhal’s recent work on his website.

Re:Collection: Dionne Lee on Susan Brodie

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Visitors to our 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. To coincide with the our collection website launch, we’re introducing a series on our blog called Re:Collection, inviting 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 an image made by Susan Brodie from multimedia artist Dionne Lee. Lee, born in New York City and based in Oakland, received her MFA from California College of the Arts in 2017. Dionne Lee: Trap and Lean-to exhibited in Light Work’s Kathleen O. Ellis Gallery in 2019.

As most of us remain homebound, I’ve found myself pulled between conflicting emotions and obligations: wanting to help but feeling helpless, wishing for connection in a time of mandatory physical solitude, tired of the indoors and wanting to go out. The desire to take a long walk, to go far away, without destination, grows daily.

This photograph by Susan Brodie offers a possibility of escape within the home. The glowing magnets of fruits and vegetables, familiar objects of a grandmother’s fridge, circling each other in a soft-shaped diamond, suggests a portal made from the most humble of knicknacks. Of course, there also is the fridge itself; both a container and gateway. So are the ingredients inside, the meals that will be created, the company that will share them, and the conversations that will happen over each composed plate (their own individual gateways), arranged and then consumed. Everything is traveling through something.  

I’m left wondering what other household objects can be gazed at, circled, squared, or spread out into an escape route: black beans let loose from their jar, a lasso of spaghetti, the bottom of a glass after the last sip of water…

Find more of Susan Brodie’s work online here.

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